Democracy Sometimes

Rumors of Occupy's Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated

2012-01-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

“Occupy’s Financial District protest falls short,” proclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle headline on Saturday, following a day of creative disruption in the financial district. “Lots of rain. Lots of noise. Few arrests, and smaller crowds than expected…. The thousands of participants organizers had hoped for never materialized, though. And those who did show up did not paralyze business as usual - which sat just fine with many who had worried they might not get to work Friday,” the article continued.

That's my affinity group, Disturbed Occupants, first thing in the morning. Thanks to Mary for great pix.

The tone of the article says more about the media than it does about the protest, which shut down at least five banks for most of the day, including the world headquarters of Wells Fargo, where my cluster of affinity groups camped out from the ungodly hour of six a.m. until early afternoon. By 9:00 a.m., friends of mine who were told by a group of workers that although police were preparing to open a service entrance, most of their colleagues had been released to take the day off. (The ones who were left had to stay around because their manager wasn’t there to give them the all-clear.)

If you read the article carefully, it’s clear that there were more than the “few hundred” protesters it alleged were there. The authors mention disruptive actions at six different buildings as well as three marches of a few hundred people each, and they can’t believe that all the same people were on all of them, especially since the participants in one were referred to as “white-haired” while another was called “mostly young.”

In fact, there were probably about 1,000 people in downtown during the day, but the 5:00 p.m. rally and march was much bigger than I expected. At least 2,000 marched from Justin Hermann Plaza and were met by a big labor march at Montgomery Street, where a stalwart group of about 40 die-hards had been chained to Bank of America since early morning. And this despite driving rain.

Demonstrations targeted at least a dozen different buildings in the Financial District, in addition to a street party that closed down major streets for hours. There was an action at Bechtel targeting war profiteering; at Citicorp’s headquarters, protestors staged a mock foreclosure, piling furniture and moving boxes into the revolving door at the main entrance; clergy and religious leaders marched around banks blowing the horns of Jericho.

A little before 4:00 pm, having declared victory and left Wells Fargo (which promptly boarded up all their doors and windows) and gone to lunch with a friend, I stopped by my office to divest myself of some of the props and supplies I was lugging around. Then I headed downstairs to take part in a protest of a company in that building, which is involved in destroying low income housing at a development in the western part of the city. I was stopped from leaving the building by guards who explained, “I’m sorry ma’am, the doors are chained shut because of the protesters.” I managed to find a way out, but when we started marching around the building, I saw workers huddled inside the doors waiting to leave. That demonstration wouldn’t have disrupted business as usual at all, if it were not for the fear of demonstrations, but for those workers wanting to slip out early on Friday afternoon, it sure did.

It’s true, the actions did not paralyze the city. The focus of the article seemed to be on the absence of the major traffic tie-ups that characterized the day after the Iraq War began in 2003 (though they did not mention that), but that action had a very different focus. Then, our intent was to make sure that everyone in corporate San Francisco felt the impact of a war which was going to have a huge impact on the people of Iraq, and on people in poor urban and rural communities in this country. We wanted to draw attention to the corporations which were profiteering off of war, but we also wanted workers and their bosses alike to have to stop and think, “Why is this happening to me?” and remember who the real victims were. Last Friday’s actions were much more focused. We wanted to put a social cost on the banks which toss homeowners and tenants out of their homes and cause underemployed college graduates to be forever in debt while refusing to pay for the services they use disproportionately. We definitely did that. We also wanted to show that the Occupy movement, which the media have been helping to paint as washed up, is “Unstoppable” as our banner said.

Occupy Oakland’s “General Strike” on November 2 did not actually paralyze Oakland either. But the Chronicle’s report on that day of action did not mention that transit ran, city offices and schools stayed open, newspapers were published and delivered, McDonalds served burgers and fries and Starbucks dished up $5 lattes. Instead, they accepted the rhetoric of the organizers:

“The first general strike called in Oakland since 1946 was largely peaceful. Young activists, middle-class wage earners, students and homeless people mingled good-naturedly as they held rallies and meditation meetings, heard speeches and marched to protest at dozens of downtown businesses and banks.

“An ice cream truck handed out treats with protest slogans, and a flash mob danced to the old disco hit ‘I Will Survive.’”

Certainly there were more people in Oakland in November than in San Francisco last Friday, but that’s not why the media took it more seriously. The General Strike came at the height of Occupy’s Fall of Grace, just a week after the police fired teargas and other projectiles at nonviolent crowds. The reporters acknowledged the general strike was “largely peaceful,” but the reason they covered it so intensively was because they hadn’t expected it to be. Occupy was the hot new thing, but it was also The Great Unknown. It was big and volatile and scary. When Occupy SF and Oakland were having weekly marches on Saturdays, I noticed that crowd estimates varied not by the actual size, but by how violent the police were going to say we were.

The sad truth is that the goal we were least successful in achieving on Friday was showing that nonviolent direct action can have as big an impact as trashing stuff. Although media and politicians insist that they would listen to us if only we would commit to pure nonviolence, for a long time now their actions have said the opposite.

Photo courtesy Luke Hauser

In Time magazine’s cover story announcing "The Protester" as Person of the Year, Kurt Andersen wrote:

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ‘70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ‘80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant “Western liberalism.” The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But …"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

But wait, to whom did the protests seem “ineffectual and irrelevant”? Not the people who were affected by the wrongs we were protesting. Those of us participating only felt that way because the media refused to let anyone know about them. Of course, I was in the antinuclear movement and the protests for sanctions in South Africa, and it’s not like the mainstream media was a big cheerleader for us even then. Protesting Israeli occupation in the U.S.? Please!

Still it is true that by the mid-1990s, the tiny media window that had been open to progressives slammed shut. It became an unwritten rule that left-wing protest would only be covered if it could be spun as a crime story. The bigger the crime, the bigger the story.

For the last twenty years, we’ve understood that if you wanted to be covered in the mainstream press, you had to have arrests. The problem for us in San Francisco is that the SFPD and the City figured that too, and it’s become next to impossible to get arrested for civil disobedience in San Francisco.

Hundreds of people risked arrest on Friday, some by locking themselves to buildings, others by blocking streets for hours, but only 23 were arrested. The majority of those arrests were at the Wells Fargo headquarters. We had at least 40 people prepared to be arrested there, but the police only arrested people at the back and side doors, leaving those of us at the large public entrances with “Wells Fargo Bank” signs over them to languish in the rain as long as we chose. Same at a number of Bank of America branches. The police won’t arrest people unless the banks tell them to, and the banks don’t want the bad publicity of mass arrests on their property, especially if the pictures are going to show people being manhandled with their logos prominently visible.

Because people were so spread out during the day, the only way the media could possibly have known how many people were out there was by asking the police, who couldn’t have known either – they only knew about actions that businesses complained about. No one called them about the line-up of poets and musicians performing at various locations around town, or about the Iraq Veterans Against the War reenactments of Search and Destroy operations around town.

There was a small amount of property damage and a minor clash with police late Friday night when activists took over a vacant hotel. (According to the Chronicle, people threw Bibles at the police.) Needless to say, that action, which most of us who participated in the day of action didn’t even know about, got the most coverage. On Saturday night, I was watching the news and suddenly there was a shot of my friends being hauled away from Wells Fargo. The voiceover said, “The Occupy protests are over, now the cleanup begins.” They showed someone sweeping up glass at an auto dealership, and then immediately went back to scenes of bank blockades and street marches. I thought, “Wow, we look so good.”

And I also thought, “I’m not in favor of violence or random property damage, but it did get us two days of coverage.”

Yvette & Me

2012-01-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

A fellow producer on Women’s Magazine whom I’d known through feminist and queer activism for over 25 years died last Sunday. We were not close, but we had gotten a bit closer over the course of her struggle with lung cancer, which had metastasized to her brain.

Yvette posted this photo on the Individual Initiatives
for Nuclear Disarmament website

It so happened that she died the morning of an event which had been planned in her honor, to raise money for supplements and ayurvedic therapies not covered by her insurance. It morphed into a lovely memorial, and I usually don’t like memorials. Singers chose songs that meant something special to Yvette, or that they thought articulated something about her. Poets had written things specially for her (one particularly nice one about the monster backpack she always carried).

Memorials always make me think about my own life, and whether I’m doing what I want to do in the world and living the way I want. Especially when the person was relatively close to my age (I’m 52, Yvette was 63), it’s a wake-up call that I might not have as much time as I think to become the person I want to be.

Yvette and I were extremely different. I’m shy and self-conscious; she was a champion “networker” (my friend Chaya said the first time she heard that word used was in connection with Yvette). She didn’t work for money much, preferring to live off the grid. She housesat – if fact she housesat for me the first couple times I went to Palestine. She ate at the events she went to, or at the food pantries where she volunteered; where she got the little bits of money she spent on food from the Discount Grocer, laundry and the occasional play or movie she couldn’t get comped to, I never knew. She went to every political or cultural event she could cram into a week, often volunteering in exchange for getting in free. She volunteered at the Arab Film Festival, the South Asian Film Festival, the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, the Queer Arts Festival, dozens of other festivals I never heard of. She cared especially about Palestine solidarity, Africa (she spent the nineties traveling through much of Africa, living in ten different countries), and disabled women’s issues. She went to parties and lectures and discussion groups. We used to joke that she was like Zelig, turning up everywhere you went. She would always sit in the very front and as soon as the event was over, if she liked it, she would be introducing herself to the speakers or performers, getting their numbers, recruiting them for events she was working on.

It was a talent I both envied and found irritating. A lot of my friends felt she never gave them the time of day because they weren’t important enough. I felt that way myself at times. Yet on a deeper level, I think all that networking left her lonely. Everyone called her friend – in the last five years, just about everyone I ever told, “I work on Women’s Magazine on KPFA,” would answer “Oh, I’m friends with Yvette.” She had a steady stream of women – mostly women, the occasional man – visiting her in the hospital and then the nursing home. Yet when she checked herself into the hospital the first time, thinking she was having a stroke, and got the dreadful news about her diagnosis, I’m pretty sure she was all alone. It was we at Women’s Magazine, who didn’t know where she’d grown up or how many siblings she had, who rallied around to raise money for her treatment and living expenses, and set up a website for people to help with rides and meals. And when we said we wanted to do that, she was truly surprised. On some level, I think she had no idea how much people cared for her.

The last time I saw Yvette, we were talking about the benefit that was coming up. She wasn’t even sure if she was going to be able to make it but she was very worried that the food wouldn’t be consistent with her all-organic, whole grain no salt or processed sugar diet. She wanted me to make sure there was plenty of food and that she’d be able to eat it. (As it turned out, the organizers decided not to have food at all. I kept thinking that Yvette’s spirit was deeply disappointed in me.)

The biggest difference between Yvette and me, I think, is that I believe she loved every minute of her life. I like my life but I’m always angst-ridden about what I have to do and whether I’m focusing on the right things, whether I’m doing enough and whether I have the skills to do what’s really valuable. I have to fight with myself to get myself to focus on writing and radio, and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, who even reads or hears this stuff? I worry that people judge me for spending eight hours a day at a stupid job that doesn’t contribute anything useful to the world, but maybe it’s that I judge myself for making that choice, so I can have material security and health insurance. Even the activities I’m the most excited about I often approach with some level of dread. I have recurring fantasies about disappearing from my life, just finding somewhere to hide out for a while.

I never got the sense from Yvette that she had any such doubts, or that she ever got up thinking, “I wish I didn’t have so much to do today.” I might be wrong, but my impression is that until she got too sick to make it to the events she wanted to go to, she looked forward to every day. And that, I think, was her true gift.

My Personal Best (and worst) of 2011

2012-01-02T13:03:00.000-08:00

Best new things I discovered this year:

-- Café Vivoli, a great lunch spot in the SF Financial District where you can get Hawaiian bar-b-q (though for obvious reasons, I never do), excellent pasta, or all you can eat pizza and salad for $6.99 after 3.

--Science Friday, great radio show (KQED 88.5 FM Fridays 2:00 pm) where you can learn about everything from the search for extraterrestrials to the habits of woodpeckers to bioremediation

-- I can get all my news from Jon Stewart

Best rediscovery: making pancakes on weekends

Best new dish I made: spinach, bean and cheese enchilada casserole

Best political action: Reoccupation of Justin Hermann Plaza

Best of Democracy Sometimes (based partly on which sparked the most discussion from you): Slut Walks and Porn Wars, This Day in History: Martial Law in the Castro

Best movie I saw: Have to admit, I saw almost no new movies last year. I think it’s the first year I was in this country when I’d seen not one of the Best Picture Oscar nominees by the time the award was given. Of the few I did see, Midnight in Paris wins hands down.

Worst thing in the mainstream media (very tough choice):

“Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

"And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.) “

from Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” cover story

Best book I read (not necessarily new this year):

Nonfiction: The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

Fiction: Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcon

Proudest achievements: Blogging regularly, and completing two drafts of Murder Under the Fig Tree

Would love to hear what's on your lists!

Democracy Lessons in the Carpool Lane

2011-12-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

I get to work via the casual carpool. For those who are unfamiliar with this Bay Area institution, it’s a way of traveling to work cheaply and usually fast. Riders line up near transbay bus stops, and drivers come by and pick up one or two passengers so they can go through the carpool lane – a carpool is defined as three or more, unless you have a two-seater. If there are more riders than cars, most drivers will gladly take a third passenger. Carpools used to go over the bridge toll-free, but now they pay $2.50 (the normal rush-hour toll is $6), so each rider pays $1. If the driver picks up three people, they make 50 cents on the deal. At my stop, it’s very changeable; some days there’s a long line of cars waiting for riders, others a long line of riders waiting for rides. Two or three times in the last year, I’ve ended up taking the bus. I’ve never heard of anyone being assaulted or harassed while riding the carpools.

The other day, I rode with a woman and a man, and as we made our way to the Bridge, they started talking about their kids. The guy’s kids were late elementary schoolers, and the woman’s were in middle and high school. The guy said he was lucky, that his kids liked school and didn’t mind doing their homework. The woman said two of hers were good students, but her oldest son – “Well, thank God there are garbage men jobs for people like him.”

Though of course there is nothing wrong with being a garbage man, and anyway it’s probably not nearly as easy to get those jobs as she thinks, I was upset that she was so dismissive of her son. It hit on something I’ve been thinking about a lot, how school so often seems to kill kids’ enthusiasm and curiosity instead of fostering it.

“There must be something,” I started to say and she cut me off.

“There’s nothing wrong with him. I thought he had ADHD, but I had him tested and he’s fine. He’s just lazy.”

Undeterred, I said, “What is he interested in?”

“You mean his hobbies?”

“Yes.”

“Skateboarding,” she said. “He and his friends spend hours out in the street, practicing their tricks. He goes snowboarding every weekend in the winter. His father says he can’t get enough of it.”

“Well maybe he’ll be a snowboarding instructor,” I suggested.

“Could be,” she said. Her voice had softened.

The driver jumped in. “There’s a skate park near where I live,” he said. “The kids were always out there, cutting school. So this guy got an idea, and he started them making videos. He set up an editing studio and taught them how to edit. They ended up learning about story writing, computer skills. Hopefully, it made them realize that there were things they could learn in school that would help them.”

I had actually been thinking of that, because back when I lived in the City and skated to work, I would always pass skateboarders filming each other. They said they made a fair amount of money that way, and that was in the days before YouTube. But his mentioning the skate park gave me another idea.

“Is there a skate park near where you live?” I asked the woman. Since she had said the kids practiced on the street, I figured the answer was no, and it was. “Well why not suggest they try to make one,” I said.

“They could design a park,” the guy said. “They would have to learn math…”

“Math and design,” I said. “And teamwork, figuring out what they want as a group. But then they could really try to get it built. They’d need to do fundraising, find out about the permitting process and how to get approval from the city. They might need to do some lobbying, and probably community organizing to counter the inevitable opposition from the neighbors. They’d have to figure out how it was going to be run, would they need a nonprofit or some other kind of organization to run it. How would decisions be made about it, how would disputes over who could use it when be mediated, and how would it be maintained?”

I didn’t say but thought that they could run into things like gang injunctions and curfews, and need to make coalitions with the people fighting those.

“They’d probably want to read about how kids in other cities got parks built,” said the driver.
The woman seemed to like the idea, and said she would talk to her son about it. As we got out of the car, it occurred to me that this was probably the first time she ever thought of her son’s talents and interests as anything other than a waste of time. If the idea catches on, it could also be the first time her son thinks of school as anything other than a waste of time.

Occupy Next Year

2011-12-25T13:23:00.000-08:00

What’s next for the Occupy movement?

That’s the question on everyone’s lips, which is a huge accomplishment in itself.

But it’s also a huge question with huge import.

Of course the only possible answer is that there isn’t one thing that’s next for the entire movement. In fact, it’s not even one movement. The movement in Des Moines or Walnut Creek looks very different, as the media love to point out, from Occupy Oakland, which I’m told is is very different from Occupy Wall Street. It’s a movement of movements; some are slick, some homegrown; some are revolutionary and others reformist.

There are the signature encampments, and there are all the cool shoots that have sprouted off to the sides – like Occupella, which sings in BART stations and at actions, Aquapie, which was a raft floating on Lake Merritt for a while, Occupy Patriarchy, a website looking at feminism and gender issues in the movement, Occupy Media, Occupy Religion...

But there are certain tropes that have bound the movement together, and those continue to evolve in tandem. Occupy Brooklyn has been reclaiming foreclosed homes for people to live in for some months, Mandela House is a squat in West Oakland taken by a group of people from Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Bernal Heights just had its first meeting to talk about defending homes in their San Francisco neighborhood from foreclosure by a variety of legal and extralegal means. The Feminists and Queers Against Capitalism bloc in Oakland has been meeting to plan a building occupation for early next year.

Some people who want to take down Bank of America, because it’s a symbol of the entire catastrophic banking system, because it’s the worst of the worst, and because they think it’s the most vulnerable of the big banks. Others want to focus on getting cities and universities and other institutions to move their money to local banks and credit unions – apparently Peralta Community College District, which runs the largest community college network in the country, just voted to do that.

I hear a lot of discussion about how white and middle-class the movement is, and how it needs to be more representative of society, to become deeper in working class and poor communities, to recognize how limiting and exclusionary the 99% rhetoric actually is. That instead of the 99% we should be talking about the bottom 25%.

Occupy the Castro held its first General Assembly (GAy) on Dec. 17. Photo courtesy of Michael Petrelis

Occupy Education groups are planning a huge mobilization for March, to fight the trends of budget cuts and fee hikes which are making higher education inaccessible to so many.

Seasoned activists are organizing traditional nonviolent direct actions on a big scale, like January 20 in San Francisco, which aims to shut down “Wall Street West” in a way similar to the first days of the Iraq war in 2003, when an estimated 20,000 people participated in blockades and occupations in downtown San Francisco.

I think the best thing about this movement is it’s “Stop Right Where You Are” quality. Like the Women’s Movement, like the student movement of the 1960s, it’s caused everyone who is dissatisfied with the current state of things to examine the conditions of their own lives. As in the early months of the Second Gulf War, everyone is doing different things but many people are doing something. A group of women from Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, who live in a senior apartment building in the Outer Mission, have adopted their local Bank of America and converge on it every other Thursday with lunch and walkers and lawn chairs and signs. Bank of America apparently got so freaked out by the sight of so many gray-haired women on the public sidewalk in front of their bank, they locked their doors and called the police.

I do have a few observations of my own, to throw into the hopper. My usual caveat – I could be dead wrong. I haven’t been that involved in the movement on the day to day level.

-- Holding public space is important.

It’s far too early for this movement to leave the streets.

Eviction defense is something I’ve been interested in for years. I’ve participated in a few actions with ACCE (Association of Californians for Community Empowerment, which took over from ACORN) and every one of them was at least temporarily successful in getting the banks to call off the sheriffs and agree to meet with the homeowners. I’d like to see these actions expanded to include tenants being evicted by big landlords as well. But these are actions best taken by smaller groups with clear leadership (hopefully from the people directly affected). They are not the place for ultrademocratic process – if I were ever being evicted, I wouldn’t want a General Assembly of 300 random people deciding by thumbs up or twinkling whether I stay or go. Ideally, as the idea spreads, people would do these types of defense with their neighbors and friends, in a decentralized way.

Camps and general assemblies give everyone who wants to check it out a place to come. As groups move indoors and become more about strategic campaigns and secret plans (even my affinity group decided not to put our January 20 target on the action website, because we don’t want the bank to be forewarned), they are likely to become smaller and narrower. That isn’t always true – March 20, 2003, as I’ve already said, was massive, but that was a pretty special situation, because everyone wanted to respond to the breakout of war. We didn’t have to do the work of letting people know when, what or why, just where and how. I don’t even know where Mandela House is. I went to the first open planning meeting for the Feminist & Queer Bloc Occupation, but it wasn’t the first meeting. I came in feeling less invested than those who were in it from the start, who obviously will have more influence than the rest of us in decision-making.

This is the “old” way, the left sectarian or community organizing model. What was bright and shiny (as well as sometimes infuriating) about Occupy was its open and transparent structure and process, the “horizontalism” and leaderlessness that the media and some Old Leftists loved to complain about.

-- Talking and listening to each other is important.

There’s still no hard and fast political unity in these movements. People are very much into the talking and processing. They still get hundreds of people coming to general assemblies, dozens coming to workshops on everything from “Capitalism 101” to the history of Haiti. To cut that off and decide that we’re “doing” one thing or another (and not something else) would, again, lose people and would also lose the energy for creating political space.

At the same time, the movement needs to find opportunities to listen to people who it hasn't heard yet. I was talking the other day to Richard Brown, former Black Panther and political prisoner. He said something that surprised me: "When the Panthers were just doing police monitoring, the community didn't really support us. It was only when we started listening to the community that we really began to create the programs that served the people." Of course listening to so many voices may sound like cacophony for a while, but themes will likely emerge that make sense and drive the movements in organic directions.

-- Specific campaigns need to be very carefully thought out.

I don’t quite understand what taking down Bank of America would accomplish, other than proving that we could. Presumably if BofA goes down, Wells Fargo or Citibank or Chase is going to buy it up at the end, getting even richer and more powerful. They’re not going to go, “Oh, these people are so powerful, we’d better start paying our fair share.” If it’s a precursor to taking down all the banks, what’s our plan for that, and more, what’s our plan for after-the-fall? Are we talking about nationalizing banks? If so, why not cut to the chase (not to be confused with Chase) and start a campaign for nationalization. If we’re talking about community control of the wealth, how is taking BofA down going to get us there? And what about the jobs? BofA has laid off a ton of workers, cut a lot more to part-time, but it’s still a huge employer – 300,000 employees worldwide. And while they’re not unionized and not great office jobs, they’re better jobs than, say, working at WalMart or making robocalls to sell insurance, and a whole lot better than being unemployed. How are we going to explain to the workers why we want them to lose their jobs?

Same goes for shutting down the Port of Oakland (to be fair, I haven’t heard anyone suggest making it the long-term target). I get that the Port gets a lot of money from Oakland and doesn’t give back, that it spews a lot of toxic stuff into the air and water, that it’s a hub for weapons going to repressive regimes and imported crap going to WalMart, but it’s also a hub for some of the last remaining well-paid, unionized jobs in the area. If we decide we want it out of Oakland, we had better have a good answer for the people who ask what’s going to happen to them when they lose those good jobs.

-- This is not a poor people’s movement nor a People of Color-led movement.

There are poor people in it. There are people of color in leadership (oh, but it doesn’t have leaders …). But those are not its roots. Its roots are among college educated young folks who are 1) frustrated about not getting the jobs they studied for; 2) inspired by the movements of Egypt, Tunisia, Spain and Greece; and 3) pissed off about their college debt. Its secondary roots are among people facing foreclosure or people who have been foreclosed, which means that they had homes to lose. Its tertiary roots are among organized labor and professional (paid or unpaid) activists. It never was and is not likely to be a movement largely composed of unemployed blue collar people, or women whose welfare has been cut off.

To suggest that it reach out to the groups that have been working with those populations is certainly a good idea. In fact, at least in Oakland and San Francisco, the nonprofits that do that kind of community organizing have been quite connected to the Occupies. To suggest that it turn itself over to those groups is not a good idea. Those groups, after all, have been working for decades and failed to galvanize a mass movement like this one. So have the international solidarity groups, who periodically point out that the 99% here is the 1% to the Global South.

Middle class white people in this country having a movement that’s empowering to them is not preventing working class or poor people, here or elsewhere, having their own movements. It’s not as if there have been huge movements of poor people, people of color, feminists, queers, in this country being ignored for the last ten years. The movements have not been there. No doubt if we built one, we’d be ignored for longer than OWS was, but hopefully the example they set – not picking up and going home because the mainstream media ignored them -- would help to embolden and inspire us.

It doesn’t make sense to criticize the people in the movement(s) for being who they are, and not who they aren’t. We’ve always known that effective community organizing has to come from within the affected communities, and this movement has shown that once again. People who have been building small cadres for the last bunch of years should be able to take the energy of this movement to spring to the next level. If they can’t, that’s not the failure of OWS, it’s their own failure. If they come to OWS for solidarity and support and don’t get it, then that’s another story. But that chapter remains to be written.

-- FWIW, my suggestion for the immediate future, in addition to the great things laid out above that are already happening, is this:

Keep having general assemblies and action councils but move them into indoor public spaces. Take over the lobbies of banks, shopping malls, movie theaters, Whole Foods, for teach-ins, speakouts, meetings. Post the locations on the websites. If they lock the doors of the place we’ve picked, which would be a big inconvenience for a business that depends on being open to the public, pick another nearby and leave a few people outside with a banner to tell people where to go. If you get inside, it gives them the dilemma of ignoring you, and then you get to have your meeting, or calling the cops which creates a spectacle. And hopefully some of the customers in whatever place we’ve picked would decide to come check out the meeting and get involved. It would be sort of a flash mob without the need for choreography and rehearsals.

War Is Over? Nine Ongoing Legacies of the War in Iraq

2011-12-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

A friend forwarded this email she received the other day.

From: Barack Obama democraticparty@democrats.org
Date: Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 12:19 PM
Subject: Iraq
Dear P,
Early this morning, the last of our troops left Iraq.
As we honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war, I wanted to make sure you heard the news.
Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time. Today's outcome is a reminder that we all have a stake in our country's future, and a say in the direction we choose.
Thank you.
Barack

****

We have not brought the war to a "responsible end." A responsible end might mean making a payment schedule for massive reparations to the Iraqi people. At the least, it would mean taking responsibility for repairing some of the damage we have done. Here's a short list of what we accomplished in Iraq.

1. Refugees:

On the one hand, the government is proudly proclaiming the end of the war. On the other, the assessment of Iraq’s internal and external security situation remains bleak. Once the troop withdrawal – scheduled for December 31 – is complete, it’s anyone’s guess how safe Iraq will be for its own people. A report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction concluded in July that “Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place to work,” and that it is “less safe… than 12 months ago.”
Since the war began in 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled the country, to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey, and two million more have been internally displaced. Iraqis who worked with the U.S. government or military were among those groups targeted with harassment, violence, or murder – along with journalists, scholars, religious minorities, LGBTI people, and tens of thousands of others….
…
Human Rights First urges the U.S. government not to abandon the tens of thousands of vulnerable Iraqis displaced by the war, and to honor its commitments to refugee protection more broadly. Specifically, we urge the government to:
Wars do – ostensibly – have start dates and end dates. Refugee protection does not. The Iraqi refugee crisis will not be over on December 31. As President Obama affirmed in 2009 at Camp Lejeune, the United States has “a strategic interest – and a moral responsibility” – not to walk away.

Source: http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/2011/12/09/u-s-withdraws-troops-from-iraq-but-must-not-abandon-its-refugees/

2. The Human Cost

Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.
Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.
Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.
Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17
Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50
Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.

Source: http://www.juancole.com/2011/12/post-american-iraq-by-the-numbers.html

Conventional wisdom in American politics focuses only on American costs in the war in Iraq: the casualties to U.S. soldiers, the financial costs, and sometimes the strategic costs. But the human cost to the Iraqis themselves are nearly ignored in political discourse, the news media, and intellectual circles. This site is a corrective to those oversights. We present empirical reports, studies, and other accounts that convey and assess the consequences of war for the people of Iraq.

Human trafficking reports fault Iraqi state: Among the consequences of war is the corrosion of social and institutional barriers to crime, and none is sadder than the rise of human trafficking. Iraq is apparently undergoing a spell of increasing trafficking, or at least more noticeable violations of sexual and labor trafficking….

New Analysis: Iraq Body Count missing 60-80% of fatalities: Iraq Body count records only about 20 percent of the fatalities listed in the U.S. military "after action" reports. This suggests that actual, violent deaths of Iraq civilians is likely to be close to 400,000 at a minimum.

Source: http://mit.edu/humancostiraq/

3. Women’s Rights:

In October 2002, Saddam Hussein released criminals from Iraqi prisons. This, and the soon-to-follow 2003 US-led assault on Baghdad, created conditions for bloodletting, for a sharp increase in organized-crime trafficking in drugs, stolen cars, and women and girls; and for the ascendancy of armed Islamist conservatism. Saddam’s tightly controlled violence and reign of terror was replaced by unpredictable, widespread violence against Iraqi women. The immediate consequences for women: hijabs worn by Muslim and Christian women alike (and abayas in some regions) to avoid being harassed and beaten in public; an epidemic of women killed in the city of Basra by fundamentalist men who leave them in the street as a lesson to other women; increased rape, including of women in detention; abduction into prostitution; and a dramatic rise in “honor” killings, the murder of women and girls by male family members to restore family honor. Muta’a – Sharia law-permitted exploitation of women by men in so-called temporary marriages, which serve as fronts for prostitution – rose after the war began with men targeting desperate, penniless widows and the Shia militia targeting single girls….

The United States owes reparations to the people of Iraq for this unsanctioned war of aggression, most of all to the women and girls who have lost their future. An international agency such as the UNIFEM-Iraq office, in consultation with Iraqi feminist organizations, could assess the cost of war reparations to Iraqi women and girls. Funding would come annually from the U.S. defense budget beginning in 2011, for eight years – the length of the Iraq War. It could be dispensed through a board comprised of Iraqi NGOs working for girls’ and women’s freedoms, including education and job training; health care and widows’ pensions; shelters for sexually exploited women and girls; the promotion of secular law and women’s equality; training of judges, police, and media in preventing violence against women; and high profile law enforcement against sexual exploitation. All for the cost of a handful of Predator drones per year.

Source: http://www.peacexpeace.org/2011/03/the-iraq-war-and-women-a-case-for-reparations/

4. Cost of War to U.S. People

Most of these stats are old:

Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq - $9 billion of US taxpayers' money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors. Also, per ABC News, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.
Lost and Reported Stolen - $6.6 billion of U.S. taxpayers' money earmarked for Iraq reconstruction, reported on June 14, 2011 by Special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction Stuart Bowen who called it "the largest theft of funds in national history." (Source - CBS News) Last known holder of the $6.6 billion lost: the U.S. government.
Missing - $1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces. (Per CBS News on Dec 6, 2007.)
Mismanaged & Wasted in Iraq - $10 billion, per Feb 2007 Congressional hearings
Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion

Source: http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm

5. Loss of Infrastructure

Electricity: Supply and Demand: Iraq’s electricity supply on the grid and estimated demand both reached record levels in July. Total supply averaged 175,580 megawatt-hours (MWh) per day, or 7,316 megawatts (MW). Each of the two components of current supply, power-plant production within Iraq and electricity imports from Iran, also achieved all-time highs. Demand, however, was almost twice the available supply— 336,900MWh per day, or 14,038MW— resulting in a 6,722MW supply-demand gap, the largest monthly shortfall to date….

Water and Sanitation: The GOI, UNICEF, and the European Union this quarter released the findings of a survey assessing the conditions of water and sanitation services in Iraq’s 18 provinces. The survey found that 79% of the population has access to the drinking water distribution network, leaving one in five Iraqis without access to safe drinking water. Access is worse in rural areas, where two in five Iraqis do not have access to drinking water networks. The survey also found that 17% of the population does not have access to adequate sanitation services.

http://www.theleftshue.com/

6. Declining Literacy:

“One in five Iraqis between the ages of 10 and 49 cannot read or write a simple statement related to daily life. While Iraq boasted a record low illiteracy rate for the Middle East in the 1980s, illiteracy jumped to at least 20% in 2010. Moreover, illiteracy among women in Iraq, at 24%, is more than double that of men (11%). As the Iraq Liaison for the international NGO Mercy Corps pointed out, "there are some locations-particularly rural locations-where the illiteracy rates are actually much higher. Illiteracy rates among women in some communities can be as high as 40-50%."…

UNESCO estimated that primary schools had nearly a 100% gross enrollment attendance rate in the 1980s and much of the 1990s.”

Source: Sept. 28, 2010 Report, NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq

Figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Education show that even before the escalation of sectarian violence in February 2006, one in six children did not attend primary school. Since the upsurge, that number is one in three.
Only one in five students at primary and secondary schools countrywide are girls. In the southern provinces, the ratio of girls attending school has dropped from two girls to three boys to one to four.
92 percent of Iraqi children experience problems learning, primarily attributed to the overall climate of fear.
Many Iraqi refugee children have missed up to three years of school as a result of displacement and violence.
As of November 2007, 340,000 Iraqi school-age refugees in Syria are not in school.
Already overcrowded schools in Damascus now have up to 60 students per class.

Source: Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

In spite of an Iraq war that began in 2003 and nearly constant news coverage, six in ten (63%) of those [Americans between the ages of 18-24] tested could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. (Ten percent said Sudan was in Europe and 43% could not find New York on a map of the United States.)

Source: http://technorati.com/lifestyle/travel/article/americans-lack-geographic-literacy-cant-find/#ixzz1h6xOOOyr

7. Sectarian and religious violence in Iraq

The sectarian violence that has swept across Iraq following last month's terrorist bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara is yet another example of the tragic consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Until the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, Iraq had maintained a long-standing history of secularism and a strong national identity among its Arab population despite its sectarian differences.
…
Top analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the United States to "expedite" such a collapse anyway.
…

One of the long-standing goals of such neoconservative intellectuals has been to see the Middle East broken up into smaller ethnic or sectarian mini-states, which would include not only large stateless nationalities like the Kurds, but Maronite Christians, Druze, Arab Shi'ites, and others.

Source: http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=8668

8. PTSD, Suicide and Unemployment in Iraq War Veterans

The number of suicides reported by the Army has risen to the highest level since record-keeping began three decades ago. Last year, there were 192 among active-duty soldiers and soldiers on inactive reserve status, twice as many as in 2003, when the war began. (Five more suspected suicides are still being investigated.) This year’s figure is likely to be even higher: from January to mid-July, 129 suicides were confirmed or suspected, more than the number of American soldiers who died in combat during the same period.

Source: 8/1/2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/02suicide.html?ref=posttraumaticstressdisorder

“One in five service members who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, but little more than half of them have sought mental health treatment, according to an independent study of United States troops.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/us/18vets.html?ref=posttraumaticstressdisorder

“On Veterans Day in America, it’s sobering to realize just how badly the job market has turned against the men and women who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their rate of unemployment was 12.1 percent in October, vs. 9 percent for the U.S. overall. But that only scratches the surface of the employment picture for vets.

“Dig deeper into the pages of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data and it becomes apparent that while the job market is slowly improving for most Americans, it’s moving in the opposite direction for Gulf War II vets (defined by the BLS as those on active duty since 2001). The youngest of veterans, aged 18 to 24, had a 30.4 percent jobless rate in October, way up from 18.4 percent a year earlier. Non-veterans of the same age improved, to 15.3 percent from 16.9 percent. For some groups, the numbers can look a good deal worse: for black veterans aged 18-24, the unemployment rate is a striking 48 percent.”

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/archives/2011/11/the_vets_job_crisis_is_worse_than_you_think.html

9. Sexual violence at home and abroad

“Iraqi female detainees have been illegally detained, raped and sexually violated by United States military personnel. Women who stay at home in traditional roles are more likely to be imprisoned as bargaining chips by US troops seeking to pressurize male relatives, according to the New Statesmen (UK) . In December 2003, a woman prisoner, “Noor”, smuggled out a note stating that US guards at Abu Ghraib had been raping women detainees and forcing them to strip naked. Several of the women were now pregnant. … Among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there were… images of naked male and female detainees; a male Military Police guard “having sex” with a female detainee; and naked female detainees. The Bush administration has refused to release photographs of Iraqi women prisoners at Abu Ghraib, including those of women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although these have been shown to Congress). UK Member of Parliament Ann Clwyd (L) has confirmed a report of an Iraqi woman in her 70s who had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib.”

Source: psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/SVIW-1.doc

“As the war in Afghanistan passes its ten-year mark, sexual assault runs rampant within the ranks, with an estimated one in three female service members raped during their service, according to at least one peer-reviewed study. This is in a military where women comprise more 11 per cent of active duty service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and more than 15 per cent of the total military, with at least 200,000 active duty women currently serving. This epidemic also affects men: 60 per cent of women serving in the National Guard and Reserve, along with 27 per cent of men, are estimated to have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Perpetrators rely on a chain of command that appears to offer virtual impunity for sexual assaults committed against lower-ranking service members.”

Source: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/09/2011916112412992221.html

“What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 p.m. to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night? Or that a soldier who was assaulted when she went out for a cigarette was afraid to report it for fear she would be demoted — for having gone out without her weapon? Or that, as Representative Jane Harman puts it, "a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire."

Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1968110,00.html#ixzz1h85MacBK

“MADRE, a global women's rights organization, is accusing Iraqi government security forces of sexually assaulting women to break up pro-democracy protests and demanding that officials intervene to protect the peaceful demonstrators.

MADRE's partner group, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), reported that activists were beaten, violently groped, and sexually assaulted by thousands of men who were bussed into Baghdad's Tehrir Square on June 10.…According to MADRE's press release, they believe that the attackers "were organized by Iraq’s official security forces and were un-uniformed to keep them from being held accountable." Some of the assailants were even carrying police identification cards.”

Source: http://news.change.org/stories/madre-denounces-sexual-violence-against-iraqi-women-protesters

“A University of Vermont fraternity has been suspended and could face further discipline after it circulated a survey asking members to name the person they'd like to rape, and the frat's national organization said he was shocked by the local chapter's behavior.”

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/12/vermont-fraternity-suspended-rape-question-survey.html

Why 9? 'Cause I thought I had ten but counted wrong. And it's enough.

Any Port in a Movement: Pondering the Shutdown

2011-12-14T20:09:00.000-08:00

We shut down the Port of Oakland on Monday. Activists in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Portland, Longview and San Diego also shut down their ports, or parts of them, for some or all of the day. Activists in Houston did a solidarity action at their port and were tented – the fire department brought a big red tent to throw over them before – well, who actually knows what they did under there? They said they did it in case they threw up sparks while cutting the blockaders out of their lockboxes. Some people pointed out that sparks inside a tent didn’t seem very safe.

Thanks to Darin Bauer and Indybay for photo

As far as I know, no workers crossed the Occupy picket lines, but that didn’t necessarily mean they supported the action. If you can believe any of their words, the leadership certainly did not, and a lot of the rank and file weren’t too thrilled either. The San Francisco Chronicle quoted truckers in Oakland complaining about lost wages, while both ILWU international president Robert McEllrath and Longview local president Dan Coffman, whose speech at Occupy Oakland partially inspired the West Coast Port Shutdown, said in the media that Occupy should leave their struggle to them.

Oakland union leaders held a press conference last Friday to defend the organizers of the day-long shutdown against charges of carpetbagging. Betty Olson Jones, president of the California Teachers Association, was eloquent in explaining why the port deserved to be targeted, that they get tons of revenue from the City and give next to nothing back. Clarence Thomas, former president of ILWU Local 10 in San Francisco, said that Occupy had reinvigorated the labor movement, and the labor movement should support Occupy. A group of truckers took the opportunity to release an Open Letter which reads in part:

An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports

We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.

Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?

For sure, the energy in Oakland was jubilant on Monday night when the 5,000 or so of us out at the Port got the news that the Port – which had confidently asserted that they would not shut down – had decided not to call in the 6:00 pm shift at all. When organizers decided to push their luck by extending the strike to the 3:00 a.m. shift, few of us were up for staying out there, many of us having been out there at 5:30 Monday morning, worked all day and then gone back out at 5:00 p.m.

The best thing about the day, according to most of my friends who went, was that it proved the power of Occupy. It also showed that it might not be as easy to marginalize and fragment the movement as the 1%, including the mainstream media, believed. Most of the actions took place without the heavy police violence I had feared, given the rhetoric of city officials and the fact that the action had at best only lukewarm backing from labor.

Certainly the argument put forth by people like Ellis Goldberg, an Occupy activist from the Bay Area suburbs quoted in the Chronicle article, that “99% actions are nonconfrontational” are ridiculous. If this movement had been primarily nonconfrontational, no one would be talking about it. Occupy/Decolonize, like every successful movement before it, will win by creating what social movement theorist Bill Moyer calls “dilemma demonstrations” or “sociodrama demonstrations.”

The success of nonviolent action campaigns is based on sociodrama demonstrations. Sociodrama demonstrations are simple demonstrations that:
-- are dramatic and exciting;
-- enable demonstrators to put themselves into the key points where the powerholders carry out their policies;
-- clearly reveal the values violations by the powerholders;
-- show the movement supporting and representing the values, symbols, myths, and traditions of the society; and
-- are repeatable in local communities across the country.

These are dilemma demonstrations in which the powerholders lose regardless of their reaction. If they ignore the demonstrators, the policies are prevented from being carried out. If, on the other hand, the demonstrators are harassed or arrested, it puts public sympathy on the side of the demonstrators and against the powerholders.

Protesting the WTO in Seattle, read my article

The argument that the movement is hurting the very people it was meant to support – repeated to the point of monotony by the mainstream media in the lead-up to and immediately after the port shutdown –has been used to against every successful movement I can think of. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was costing Southern Blacks jobs because they couldn’t walk to work; the civil rights movement in the North was boycotting and picketing businesses where Blacks worked. The Free Speech Movement was keeping students from getting the education they came to college for, and poorer students couldn’t afford to miss classes. We were told that divestment from South Africa would hurt Black South Africans the most and an ANC victory would result in a blood bath. Those of us who shut down the WTO Ministerial in Seattle did not “understand the benefits of free trade to developing nations.”

When Stop AIDS Now Or Else briefly disrupted the opening night at the opera in 1989, a local gay paper quoted a gay man with AIDS as saying it was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

So the fact that labor in general and some dockworker unions in particular were unhappy about the port shutdown does not necessarily mean it wasn’t the right tactic at this time. But it’s not something to be dismissed out of hand either. During the weeks leading up to the shutdown, I tried to get clear in my own mind both the political purposes of the shutdown and who was really supporting and opposing it.

As for the first, the objectives seemed all over the place. It was in solidarity with truckers in Long Beach who were fired for wearing union t-shirts, and with dockworkers in Longview, Washington, who sabotaged trains a few months ago as part of their struggle to keep their union. It was to interfere with the flow of commerce, dealing a mighty blow to the biggest corporations in the country. It was to stop business as usual. It was to protest reliance on imported goods, which means export of manufacturing jobs, and the pollution of the waters by carriers like Cosco Busan, which spilled 53,569 gallons of oil into the Bay four years ago. It was to protest the role of the port itself in bankrupting Oakland. It was to punish the police for repressing the Occupy movement around the country.

All good reasons, and I’ve done plenty of actions that had multiple goals. That’s often a plus in selling an action ‑ something for everyone. But except for the labor issues specific to the docks and the bad citizenship of the port itself, I think there are better targets for most of those issues.

For the second question, who was supporting it, I asked friends who are members of the longshore unions and a lawyer who represents the Longview workers, among other maritime unions on the West Coast. The response that I got from pretty much everyone I asked was that the workers they knew basically didn’t think this was the right action at the right time. Now these are not anti-activist people. They’re people who have been out in the middle of the night, defending camps and helping to get people out of jail. But when I brought up concerns at meetings or on lists, I was told that only bureaucrats were opposing the strike, all the rank and file were excited about it. I felt that a certain orthodoxy had set in, where to question the strategic wisdom of this action was to be opposed to militancy.

So I asked myself, have I become unmilitant in my middle age? I sure never thought that would happen. But I am unwilling to support something just because it’s militant. I know people who have done that and ended up participating in actions they later regretted. Some of them spent years in prison for actions they later concluded were well-intentioned but not the right tactic at the right time.

For sure, the attacks on the shutdown made me want to participate and defend it. The port placed full-page ads in the Oakland Tribune and the New York Times denouncing the shutdown and pretending to speak for labor and the community. The faux folksy tone made my skin crawl. The threats of Mayor Quan and others to keep the port open at all costs – invoking the specter of April 2003, when police responded to a protest at the docks by shooting people with wooden dowels and rubber-coated bullets, and the relentless efforts of the media to portray labor as more united against the action than it was, to beat the drum of the good versus bad Occupiers infuriated me and made me want to block the port for a week.

But the fact that the authorities don’t want us to do something isn’t necessarily a reason to do it.

The other problem with this West Coast shutdown coming so soon after November 2 is how do we escalate from here? Are people going to be willing to go back to blockading banks (I hope so, since we’re organizing a shutdown of the San Francisco financial district for January 20) or holding neighborhood councils or squatting foreclosed homes? Maybe. Certainly I can think of some very cool actions which would be escalations of a different sort, and I’m sure people have much better ideas than I do. Personally, I’ll be happy if whatever those ideas are, they don’t involve getting up at 4:30 in the morning.

The People United: Not Just a Meaningless Chant

2011-12-08T23:33:00.000-08:00

When police raided OccupySF’s camp at Justin Hermann Plaza on Tuesday night, they used the well-rehearsed line that “the park had become a health and safety hazard.” Reporters made much of the fact that it would take “a long time” for Public Works to repair the damage to this beautiful park, notwithstanding that just six weeks ago, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Urban Design Critic, John King, wrote “Whatever you think of the politics, and whatever happens in the days to come, give Occupy San Francisco credit for this: It has activated a park that sat dormant for 10 years.”

The businesses that complained about the camp literally have their heads up their whatevers, because I work right next door and can tell you that no one comes down to this edge of downtown to shop. People come through on their way to the baseball stadium or to the ferry or Fisherman's Wharf, or they work here. They're not going to stay away because of 100 or 200 people camped out in an unused bocce ball court nearby. And then there's the fact that thousands of people have come to the Saturday demonstrations organized by OccupySF and they all want to get lunch before or dinner, drinks or coffee after, or they happen to see some street art they like in the plaza, and then there are the hundreds and hundreds of cops eating lunch in the sandwich places - my coworker says they are in the place he goes for lunch every day. So I am positive that the net result on most businesses in the area has been positive or neutral, just as the survey done by a businessman in the neighborhood of Occupy Oakland found was the case there.

And as we could have told them, the 1:00 am raid on the camp, done with the violence and shock tactics that have characterized these pre-dawn attacks around the country, has already resulted in much more disruption and cost, not to mention bad PR for the City, than the camp ever did. A noon rally spontaneously moved into Market Street, where it remained for hours, blocking the F line streetcar and #14 bus, which originate there. I stayed at the rally for about half an hour and then went to Justin Hermann to get a tamale for lunch. I talked to Alicia, originally from Cuernavaca, living in Berkeley for ten years, who started her lunch cart there two months ago, just at the same time that OccupySF came to the plaza. She said that Occupy had not been good for her business, because “They would always ask for free food, and I couldn’t say no, because they were hungry.” But she said she supported the camp and was sorry to see it go. “They are doing it for all of us,” she said.

About 20 cops on horseback were guarding the closed park. There was a mobile command center – something I never saw before, like a huge trailer, and at least twenty cars and as many motorcycles parked in front of my office. Two lines of riot cops that I could see, and I’m sure many more that I couldn’t, lurked a block away from the demonstration, waiting for orders to charge. I guess they waited all day, then followed the march that left in the late afternoon.

I missed the march because I had to work, but went back to the Plaza for the GA at 6:00. By the time I got there, hundreds of riot cops had amassed, helicopters were buzzing overhead and television crews were hauling their gear into the plaza. I saw Buff, a member of my new affinity-group-in-formation. Great, I would have someone to hang with. Someone said the cops had given a dispersal order, although no one in the plaza heard it. David got on the bullhorn and told people it seemed like maybe the cops were getting ready to give a dispersal order, and people who couldn’t be arrested might want to move to the perimeter, while those who could risk arrest should move in and link arms so we looked unified. Buff called his wife, Cindy, to tell her he was probably getting arrested, and decided to go to the bathroom one more time. Seconds after he left, the cops moved in and surrounded those of us still in the plaza, just about 75 of the 300 or so people there. I looked around and didn’t see anyone I knew very well, so I sat down with some young people and introduced myself. One of them said she had never been arrested before, and hadn’t imagined she would be doing it now. I asked how she felt about that. She said, “I’m trying to avoid making decisions out of fear, so I feel good about it.”

We started out linking arms in two tight rows, behind one small symbolic tent that had been put up in the middle of the bocce ball courts. Every ten minutes or so, the cops would close in about five feet, and we would move the tent a little closer to us. After a while, we stopped linking arms and started milling about. Two guys were grabbed from outside the perimeter and dragged inside the police lines; no one seemed to know what their “crime” was. One, a white guy, was okay, but the other, who was Black, was lying twisted face down in the dirt, his hands cuffed behind him with metal cuffs. The cops wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to him to ask if he was okay, or what he needed. We said it seemed like he needed an ambulance – we couldn’t even tell if he was conscious. They said they had called one. They put plastic cuffs on the white guy and left him sitting by himself. He said he was thirsty. I found a bottle of water someone had left lying around and carefully poured water into his mouth. A few minutes later, they brought another guy in handcuffs to sit by the white guy and then a woman.

Meanwhile more and more people had been showing up to support the camp, having gotten text alerts and phone calls from friends. They linked arms in a giant circle outside of the two police lines. I saw Buff, linking arms with my friend Sasha, just back from putting up a giant banner (pictured) over the Rainbow Tunnel, between San Francisco and Marin. Now obviously, the police could have beaten their way out, they could have used tear gas or pepper spray to disperse the crowd, or they could have just arrested everyone, but they obviously didn’t want to do any of those things. They had hoped that most people would leave and they would be able to arrest a few die-hards, like they had done in the morning (70 people were arrested then), and that would be that.

Half an hour later, there was a row of five arrestees sitting on the curb, and the injured guy was still lying face down in the dirt; the ambulance had not shown up. We started yelling to the media that there was an injured guy being denied medical care, Cat talked about it on the bullhorn, and eventually they let an RN from the crowd go and talk to the guy. She seemed to think he would be okay. Then the paramedics came and worked on him for a while before they took him away on a stretcher.

David announced that the police had offered a deal, and those of us inside the lines should gather around so we could meet about it. They wanted us to accept an “admonishment,” basically a warning to stay away from the park, and we would be able to leave without being arrested. We discussed it at length, even though no one really wanted to accept. We agreed that people who wanted to accept the admonishments – people who hadn’t planned to get arrested and maybe had reasons why it would be a bad idea – should be allowed to do so, including the five people who had already been arrested, and the rest of us would continue with our GA and exercise our First Amendment rights to assemble in a public park. The cops said that the five arrestees could only be released if we all took the deal. At first it seemed like we might have an issue, because a couple of those folks really wanted to take it, and most of us really didn’t, but after further discussion, they all said they were willing to go with whatever the group agreed. We made our announcement to the folks outside and asked the police to back up and let anyone who wanted to participate in the GA do so together.

Eric Mar, a San Francisco Supervisor who is supposed to be a leftist, got on the bullhorn from outside and thanked the police chief and captain for being so nice and being willing to negotiate. Many people booed. I heard a commotion and saw people surging toward the police line on the other side of the park. I went to see what had happened. About six cops were huddled around of a figure I couldn’t really make out but I saw two shoes sticking out from under the tangle of police legs. They were basically sitting on this guy, one on his neck, one on his stomach, two on his legs.

“Can he breathe?” I asked one of the cops standing nearby. He nodded, and mouthed, “He can breathe.”

“How do you know?” I asked. He shrugged.

“What did he do anyway?” I asked. He didn’t know.

Marcus, in the trademark bright green hat that identifies legal observers, came over and asked the lieutenant, “What are you charging him with?” The lieutenant said that the guy had thrown something, which turned out to be a tent, over their heads and it hit an officer in the head. I swear, his lips twitched as he said it. The guy I had talked to looked at me and said, “See?” Okay, I thought, can you say "Ill-Thought-Out"?

I heard a cheer and turned around. The cops were marching out, single file, row by row. Seems they had decided to accept our counterproposal after all. Marcus and I watched in amazement as someone took the cuffs off the guy they had been sitting on and sent him on his way with a pat on the shoulder. I literally never saw anything like it here. In Palestine, that kind of thing would happen a lot, the army would grab someone at a demonstration, the community would confront them and negotiate and eventually they would release the person. But here, I always thought once you’re in cuffs, you’re going into the system. The poor guy who got taken away in the ambulance may be the only one still facing charges from last night.

One of my least favorite chants has always been “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” It seems like a total lie. In 1983, a comedian named Fran Peavey did a routine at one of our talent shows during the two-week jail-a-thon in Santa Rita, and said she had come up with a chant for the eighties: The People United Will Sometimes Win and Sometimes Lose. “The problem,” another friend recently suggested, “is that the people never are united.”

Last night, I felt like I believed it for the first time: if we are united, we cannot be defeated.

Dreaming of My Dream Job

2011-12-03T17:39:00.000-08:00

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and he said he was going to look for a new job. Like me, he works at a law firm, and like me, his long-time employer went bust a few years ago and he followed some of the attorneys to a new firm. I asked what he didn’t like about the job and he gave a few examples, but, he acknowledged, “I might just be tired of working.”

Thanks to erix for the photo

He and I have both been doing clerical work at law firms for over 20 years. As 99% jobs go, they’re great. Good money, good (though worsening) benefits, not too much micromanagement from supervisors, casual Fridays, computer access. But it’s unstimulating and a little depressing to think that we’re going to be doing it five days a week, 48 weeks a year or so, for probably another 18-20 years, assuming the economy doesn’t totally collapse before that.

A few months ago, I started thinking maybe I could do radio full-time. I’ve been doing it almost weekly for more than five years, I’ve done a bunch of pretty good pieces and shows, and I love it. I started looking online and there were actually some jobs at community stations advertised, and I thought I might apply for one. It was in Seattle, at the University radio station. As I started thinking about what to put (and not put) on my resume, I thought, Okay, this job only requires 2 years’ experience, so presumably it pays almost nothing. I’m sure they are expecting to hire someone a few years out of college. It’s an editorial job, working with the senior news editor. Do I really want to spend my days arguing with a senior editor half my age – or less – about why what I think is important should go on the air, for probably half as much money as I make now? Do I want to deal with the very likely possibility of not getting an interview, or even a rejection letter, for this job I’m way overqualified for? No. And while I love my Seattle and my friends there, do I want to move 800 miles from the community I’ve spent the last thirty years building?

I didn’t send the resume.

In general, when someone asks me how long I expect to be at my job, I say I expect to get carried out of there in a box, or dragged out in cuffs. I’m not sure which scenario is more appealing.

But the conversation with my friend made me start thinking: there must be a job out there that would make me bound out of bed every day eager to get to work, like how I felt at Hedgebrook or my recent self-made writing retreat. What would it be? Here are few people I think have my dream jobs, so I guess all I have to do is wait for one of them to quit or retire:

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet for the Nation. He gets to write one two-line poem a week. Here’s one of his latest, coincidentally about his dream job:

One job’s a job I never would forgo.
That job, of course, is being CEO.
According to the customs now prevailing,
It pays a lot—and pays you more for failing.
It must be nice to have a job wherein
You cannot lose, for if you lose you win.

(Okay, Trillin fans, don’t get on my case. I know he also writes books and New Yorker articles, including a recent interesting retrospective on the first Freedom Ride, which he covered in 1963).

Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Not only does she get to talk to all the coolest people, but she has a whole team of producers helping her get them and figure out what to ask, and then everyone talks about how brilliant she is (which she is).

Noam Chomsky. Admittedly, the guy’s paid his dues. But hey, now he gets to spend all his time giving political opinions in a monotone, and people actually listen. In the same vein, Arundati Roy gets to travel the globe fomenting revolution.

Admissions officer for the Tipple Business School at the University of Iowa. What? Not only do I know nothing about and have no interest in the business, but when I was a TA in Political Science at Cal, lo those many years ago, the business students always wrote the deadliest dullest essays. So who would want to read thousands of them? But get this: Tipple applicants now tweet their essays! So as an admissions judge, you get to grant or dash someone’s hopes for their future in just 140 characters. The top tweet was a haiku. There are also, apparently, numerous Twitter scholarships available, many of which go unclaimed. Whose Tweets? Our Tweets!

Herman Cain. Someone is obviously paying that man a lot of money to say outrageous things while pretending to run for president.

If you have a dream job and I didn’t mention it, please say so in a comment on my blog. (If you have trouble posting under an ID, you should be able to post anonymously.)

Whose Rainbow? My Week of Occupying Everything

2011-11-20T12:27:00.000-08:00

This was going to be my week off from Occupying, but it didn’t work out that way.

Photo courtesy Steve Rhoads via flickr

Late Sunday/early Monday I got the text message that Occupy Oakland was being evicted. I rushed down there, even though I knew it would probably be hours before the raid, which it was. So I went to work Monday with a scant two hours of sleep. Tuesday night I rushed over to Cal after work to catch the end of their Day of Action, Robert Reich giving the Mario Savio Lecture to an assembled 5,000 or so people crammed into Sproul Plaza. Wednesday I spent my lunch hour marching around the San Francisco Financial District with a spirited student-led demonstration demanding that California refund public education; Thursday at lunch I responded to an alert to go to a protest in support of Pancho Ramos Stierle, who was arrested at Occupy Oakland and turned over the Immigration; that one, as far as I could tell, did not happen, but at least the cops seemed as confused as I was.

Thursday night we heard that Occupy SF was expecting a raid, so I went over after work, decided I needed warmer clothes so went home, changed, ate dinner and drove back to the City, just in time to get the text saying they didn’t expect a raid after all. Stayed an hour and left.

Yesterday, I marched around Oakland for hours with a few thousand others, marched right past my own house twice, fought the temptation to duck out and go curl up in front of the heater with my cat and a cup of tea. Good rally at one of the five schools slated for closure at the end of this year, although a friend pointed out that a big majority of teachers and parent activists are women and all the ones who spoke were men.

Photo courtesy Bradley Stuart and Indybay

Then we marched back to 19^th and Telegraph where we knocked down a hastily erected fence around the big empty lot and park and established a new, beautiful Occupy Oakland camp. They set up the sound system and played dance music and chanted "Evict us and we multiply/Hella Hella Occupy." It started to pour. By the time I got home, I was so stiff I could barely move. I changed into dry clothes, put dinner in the oven and curled up with a book about the Free Speech Movement. People who are constantly criticizing the Occupy movement’s ultrademocratic process as producing a garbled message, should check out this book. People like Cal Student Advisor Faye Lawson, who allegedly participated in FSM and was onKCBS radio saying,

“Mario spoke with one voice, and he listened…. I think this movement needs direction. They need a speaker and they need to come together as a cohesive group with one voice and one mission…Then they can negotiate what they want on the table, what they want from us.”

Here’s a quote from FSM Steering Committee member Patti Iiyama, about the day that the students surrounded the police car on Sproul Plaza in 1964, when Savio and a few other “leaders” made an agreement with the administration to abandon the sit-in:

“Our first reaction was ‘My God! He had no right to make that agreement without coming back and taking a vote of everybody sitting around the car,’ because here we were willing to get our heads bashed in, and Mario and several other people had signed this agreement.”

And here’s FSM Executive Committee member, Andy Wells, talking about events a couple months later (this is in the chapter entitled “Internal Combustion”):

“We felt [the Steering Committee] were moving too fast without consulting the student body and there wasn’t enough communication between the Executive Committee and the Steering Committee. We felt that though we agreed with a lot of the proposals, the Steering Committee was very skilled in parliamentary maneuverings and it seemed that an awful lot of railroading was going on. … It seemed like a lot of secrecy was going on…Jack Weinberg and Mario and particularly Steve Weissman …defeated some proposals that we thought were pretty sound.”

This is not to say that the FSM was any more screwed up than many other groups, or that Occupy does everything right. It’s not to dispute that “horizontal” groups are always more democratic than groups with clearly defined leadership, or that consensus can’t be manipulated just as much as Robert’s Rules of Order (which my friends who have experience in labor unions call Robot’s Rules) can. In my considerable experience with groups that are “horizontal” or practice “pure democracy,” there’s always covert leadership, and a lot of times it’s self-appointed by those who have endless hours to spend in meetings, without the accountability that can come from elections, and with no ability to correct for things like the disproportionate influence of white men. A friend who has been heavily involved in Occupy Oakland, and comes out to every march and camp defense, referred to the Oakland General Assembly as a “dudefest.”

My opinion is that every popular movement embodies both a real human drive for democracy and the limitations of most forms of democracy. Except in very small groups where everyone knows each other very well and are completely on the same page politically, it can be painfully slow to make decisions by consensus. If you try to short-cut it by using majority or supermajority vote, people end up feeling disempowered and if they end up on the wrong side of the vote more than a couple times, they are likely to walk away. But people who can’t stick out the long process of reaching consensus are equally likely to walk away.

A lot of groups I’ve been in recently have adapted something I call faux-consensus, where decisions are officially made by “consensus” but we also have an agreement to keep meetings short, so everything that doesn’t reach consensus easily is either tabled or resolved in some technocratic way, like being turned over to a “working group” or relegated to a Parking Lot (a piece of butcher paper for things you’re not actually going to deal with in the meeting). So that gives the impression of everyone’s concerns being addressed, but really it’s just a way of shoving aside what the organizers of the meeting, who made the agenda, didn’t think was important. What is really going on is that the important decisions have been made before anyone walked into the meeting and the only real role for people who come to it is to take on a few discrete tasks that the organizers don’t feel they need to control and recruit others for the action.

Okay, that was a long digression into something that’s been on my mind a lot – this rabid obsession with trashing the leaderlessness of the Occupy movement (though one article I read recently called it “leaderfull” which I think is both accurate and lovely). But back to the chronology of my break from Occupying:

At midnight, I put down the FSM book, having just gotten to the part where the negotiations with the administration fell apart and the students were setting up their illegal tables again on Sproul Plaza (hilarious to me, because those tables have been a fixture of the campus since I started school there in 1980, and the order of things has hardly come crashing down). I watched a rerun of “Grey’s Anatomy.” At 1:00 am I turned off the TV and was about to go to bed when I got a text message – “OccupySF call for support; come defend 101 market; cops in riot gear NOW staging a few blocks away.” I grabbed my car keys, though I knew there was a good chance it would be over by the time I got there, which it more or less was. The cops were blocking access to the Market Street encampment, and even though my work ID got me close, I couldn’t really see. My friend David and I walked around with a couple heavy “Make the Banks Pay” banners, in hopes of injecting a little on-point messaging into an otherwise pretty unfocused scene. I stayed about an hour, long enough to get wet and cold again.

I got home around 3:00 and went to sleep. At 8:06, I got another text: “Riot cops at Occupy Oakland GET HERE NOW!!! 20 minute warning for raid.” I dressed and drove the few blocks to the new camp. It wasn’t raining so I didn’t take my rain jacket. Nearly all the tents, art, equipment was gone from the space by the time I got there. A line of riot cops was standing at the edge of the park, and every five minutes they would move about ten yards closer to the people who were frantically disassembling tents. It started to rain again. At the end, with the cops encroaching, I helped carry out the last two improvised tents. We didn’t have time to take them apart, so one person took each pole as if it were a chupah, a Jewish wedding canopy. As the cops pressed us the last few yards out of the park, supporters showed up with coffee and oatmeal for the campers, who drank and ate it in the street under a rainbow.

They chanted “Whose rainbow? Our rainbow.”

Is There a Disinformation Campaign Against #Occupy?

2011-11-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, I predicted that the government was going to use some form of COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) to destroy the Occupy/99% movement. At that time, I focused on the possibility of infiltration in order to create dissension within the groups. That is still very likely as the movement moves to its next phase, whatever that turns out to be now that controlled demolition has been employed around the country to remove encampments. But there is another form of COINTELPRO, which is even easier for the elites to launch, and that’s disinformation.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about disinformation:

Disinformation (a translation of the Russian word dezinformatsiya) is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately….Disinformation should not be confused with misinformation, information that is unintentionally false….A common disinformation tactic is to mix some truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal part of the truth while presenting it as the whole….

UC and SF State Students join OccupySF at Bank of America
Courtesy D. Boyer, Indybay

We are already seeing a pattern of this with regard to the Occupy encampments. While I cannot say for sure that it’s a nationally coordinated strategy, we know that the physical attacks on the camps were coordinated by Homeland Security, and there is a suspicious sameness in the allegations made to criminalize and marginalize the Occupy groups in cities across the country.

New York: “The park was becoming a place where people came not to protest but rather to break laws, and in some cases to harm others,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a nationally released statement.

University of California: “The University of California regents have canceled this week’s meeting in San Francisco, citing a ‘real danger of significant violence and vandalism.’ UC leaders said Monday that university police told them 'rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting'....”

DC: “’The one-month-old Occupy D.C. movement has grown ‘increasingly confrontational and violent,’ the District’s police chief said…”

San Francisco: “Managers at the Ferry Building…blamed a rash of shoplifting, vandalism and muggings at the Embarcadero marketplace on Occupy campers they said had run amok.”

From Fox News: “A rash of reports of sexual assaults at Occupy Wall Street protests across the country has both police and activists raising red flags…The most serious incident was reported in downtown Portland last night – cops responded to calls of a Molotov cocktail being set off near the city’s World Trade Center…At the site of the Occupy San Diego camp, street cart vendors were forced to close up shop when protesters, angry that they stopped receiving free food, ransacked and vandalized the carts.”

In some cases, incidents near Occupy camps are immediately linked to the protests, where no evidence exists that there’s a connection. In Oakland, a man was tragically killed in a fight near the plaza where the camp was located. The police – who had been calling for the camp’s destruction since it went up – mentioned in an open letter begging the protesters to leave the Plaza that “This is the 101st homicide in the city this year,” implying that the month-old encampment was somehow responsible for eleven months’ worth of murders. At Cal Berkeley, a freak incident in which an allegedly armed student was shot and killed by police at the business school was immediately linked by the media and the college administration to Occupy-themed protests that were happening on campus that day. The local CBS radio station reported:

“It was the first on-campus shooting since 1992. In that earlier incident, an Oakland police officer fatally shot a machete-wielding activist from nearby People’s Park who had broken into the former chancellor’s mansion….The shooting occurred as anti-Wall Street activists were preparing another attempt to establish an Occupy Cal camp after a failed effort last week led to dozens of arrests.”

By mentioning Wall Street, and using the word “activist” in both contexts, the story manages to imply that the shooting at the business school was an anti-business protest. In fact, unlike the woman who allegedly broke into the ex-chancellor’s house, who was involved in the movement to stop the college from turning People’s Park into a volleyball court by the college, no evidence has been offered that the student killed on Tuesday had any connection to Occupy Cal. He was taking classes at the business school.

Disinformation: “mixing truth with false conclusions and lies.” There is some truth in many of the accusations. There has in fact been sexual assault and sexual harassment at Occupy camps. There’s also been racial and anti-queer harassment. The camps have set up mechanisms to deal with these, some better than others, but that doesn’t differentiate them from pretty much any other place in the country where people live. If the police raided every work place where sexual harassment, up to and including assault, was taking place, it’s hard to believe there would be a public or private office left open.

The disinformation has been combined with a government tool that is even more common in our “democracy”: criminalizing dissent. Now in a lot of countries, governments simply outlaw protest, either entirely or in certain circumstances. Here, it’s generally more complicated than that. We have freedom to dissent, as long as our expressions of dissent have no possibility of influencing anyone. The people in charge say, “You don’t need to make trouble; you don’t need to sit in at lunch counters, you can picket, you can vote, you can write to your Congresspeople. If you don’t get what you want, obviously it’s because not enough people agreed with you.” When two-thirds of the people opposed the ongoing Iraq war, Cheney said he didn’t make policy by opinion polls. When at least 70% of the people (including 61% of millionaires) want to raise taxes on the 1% instead of cutting funding for schools and social services, government spokespeople say we should have protests in places that don’t create inconvenience. And if you insist on being where they don’t want you to be, you’re the problem – you’re a criminal.

It’s like in the old Malvina Reynolds song: “It isn’t nice to block the doorway, it isn’t nice to go to jail/There are nicer ways to do it, but the nice ways always fail.” She wrote that in 1964.

The media collude in this by only covering most protest if it’s a crime story. Two years ago, when asked why they continually ignored large demonstrations against the Iraq War, the Washington Post responded that they do not cover rallies. They were covering the Tea Party non-stop, but theoretically, they were not covering the Tea Party’s rallies, they were covering the threat they posed to political officials. Except that they covered the threat by interviewing its spokespeople at length. More than two weeks after Occupy Wall Street had set up in Zuccatti Park, the New York Times said they were not covering it because it wasn’t very big and had no famous people involved. This was after several thousand people had participated in marches and General Assemblies, and Michael Moore, Roseanne Barr and Eve Ensler had all visited the camp.

The only way for left-wing protests to get coverage, and it’s not a sure bet itself, is if there are arrests, which is why so many of our actions involve orchestrated civil disobedience. But then, much of the time the story is that we were arrested, so we’re obviously criminals.

While there was a brief moment when the media was having a little love-fest with the 99% Movement, it has mostly passed. Now actions of police and others against protesters are reported as evidence of our criminality, while standard civil disobedience tactics are branded “violent.”

One of the bases for DC police chief Cathy Lanier labeling the occupation “increasingly violent” was that at a demonstration on Friday night, “four protesters were hit by a vehicle….She described the group as peaceful last week but distributed videos Monday showing some protesters blocking the doors of the convention center and pounding on windows.”

On a march in San Francisco last Saturday, which I was involved in organizing, police attempted to force us onto the sidewalk by riding motorcycles into protesters, shoving us and grabbing at our banners. The march was calling attention to the military tribunals that Egyptian democracy activists are facing, now that the army, which helped to oust Mubarak, has consolidated its power. The only media story about it – which was picked up by pretty much every newspaper in the country and even by progressive radio station KPFA – was that police claimed their officers were attacked in two separate incidents, one involving an Xacto knife.

We are pretty sure these incidents didn’t happen (we have video, which doesn’t show them), but our police liaison did say that an officer in charge told him a cop might have been cut by a something attached to a banner. That’s possible, since the banner poles were wooden and the cops were grabbing at them, but it’s quite different from what they later reported, “a woman came from the crowd, slashed an officer's hand with a pen knife or razor blade, then disappeared before he realized he'd been cut.” In every previous Saturday march since OccupySF began, we have marched in the street and the police made no effort to stop us. But this week, they changed their tactics and suddenly we are criminals.

At UC Berkeley last Wednesday, when police badly beat students for trying to set up a tent – on their own campus, which they’re paying handsomely to attend, BTW, the police captain explained that “linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.” The chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, famously repeated that claim in a statement which made it all the way to Stephen Colbert’s show. Obviously Birgeneau either has never seen pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. linking arms with Dr. Ralph Bunche on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, or he assumes that all the guys we name holidays and streets after were violent criminals – which, of course, might not be so far from the truth.

So if Homeland Security, under Obama, is now coordinating a disinformation campaign to discredit the Occupy movement, after Nancy Pelosi and the president himself expressed support for its goals a few weeks ago, why? Of course I don’t know, but I do have a theory.

-- The Obama administration needs these protests to be over before the Day After Thanksgiving (I refuse to use the term “Black” Friday). Given the fragile state of the economy, nothing can be allowed to interfere with the almighty shopping season. Mayors and city officials too are afraid of the possible impact that unsightly and bad-smelling camps rife with homeless people and anti-capitalists might have on those all-important retail numbers. They had planned to be well done with this movement by now, having started the raids long ago, but the backlash over Shock and Awe in Oakland delayed them by several weeks. So now they need the camps to be gone, and they need help speeding it up. In San Francisco, for instance, Mayor Ed Lee was more or less forced to endorse the camp, which has the advantage, we were told, of not being in an “inconvenient” – read central – location, because his public works people were saying that it wasn’t a problem, that the campers were being very cooperative with them, and the local papers were actually saying that it was “bringing back a blighted park.” But that was a week ago, when he had barely squeaked out an election he was never supposed to be in. Now, it seems he’s being pressured by someone, or perhaps many people, to get with the program and he needs a justification to reverse course.

-- The Democrats are worried about their legislative agenda. They sort of liked the movement at first, because it gave them some leverage, and that actually seemed to pay off for them – they got a few things done in the last weeks. But now the debt super-committee is about to come back with its recommendations to slash and/or privatize Medicare and Social Security; the jobs bill is weak and going to get weaker; they are not going to deliver on any of their fine rhetoric about taxing the 1%, and they DO NOT want highly energized, mobilized crowds in every city ready to go marching through the streets. They may not dare to tell Homeland Security to go round up all the activists and put us in a stadium somewhere until future notice, but they’re going to do the next best thing – shove the protesters out of sight, and smear the hell out of any who won’t go quietly.

And in that effort, Disinformation is their friend.

Live Long and Prosper?

2011-11-13T12:58:00.000-08:00

Around 3:00 pm yesterday, just when I was thoroughly sick of being at work, I got an email from a coworker entitled “PUMPKIN PIE.” She had brought two pies from a bakery near her house and was offering to share with people she likes. She’d even brought a can of whipped cream. I ran up there. Didn’t literally run, I took the elevator, maybe it would have been a good idea to pre-burn the calories by walking up the 24 stories, but the building doesn’t allow it and there was that little problem of having work to do. But it sure helped get through the rest of the afternoon.

As I washed the pie down with cappuccino - our office recently got new machines that offer espresso, cappuccino (not bad, really), French Vanilla (fat free, whatever that means), Hot Chocolate, and various combos - I flashed on the most recent interview I’d heard with Michael Pollan, who nearly always seems to be on one talk show or another. “If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry,” he said. (To which Stephen Colbert replied, “That’s quite an insult to the apple industry.”)

Now Pollan, who has actually done a lot of great work on the food industry, is not as bad as a lot of the people I incessantly hear on the radio. People like John McDougall, creator of Livestrong and Jeanie Redick, founder of Eat forLife, who claim we are “meant” to eat only whole, unprocessed plant foods, are missing a fundamental point.

If I were not “meant” to eat pumpkin pie, it would not taste so good or make me so happy.

Moreover, the people who claim that humans are by nature hunter-gatherers (though they really mean gatherers, because they’re all vegans), and that eating dairy is a recent alien innovation, never met my ancestors. Pollan suggests we follow “the wisdom of our grandparents” when it comes to food. My grandmother did not invent the recipes for malai (corn bread with farmer cheese, butter and sour cream) or noodle kugel with cream cheese and sour cream, or milchiks, a type of pastry whose very name means “dairy.” She learned them from her mother, who no doubt learned them from hers.

The basis for all these new-fangled theories about how we should not eat anything but unadulterated vegetables is that the only reason past generations were able to get away with ingesting inappropriate animal products was because they didn’t live long enough to experience the ill effects. Now that we in the developed countries are not so subject to the ravages of typhoid, rampant tuberculosis, war or being eaten by bears, we are discovering how unhealthy our diet is.

Again, this seems counter-historical to me. My grandmother lived to be ninety. I wouldn’t say the last five or so years of her life were that happy, and she wasn’t necessarily in the best health, but more of that has to do with a fairly sedentary lifestyle once her kids were grown up, less awareness of the importance of taking steps to prevent things like osteoporosis, and probably also early experiences in Romania. She had some heart issues late in life, but as far as I know, she never had a major illness until then. For most of her life she was happy. She had most of her kids and grandkids around her (she lived in Montreal, and I grew up 800 miles away in Richmond, Virginia, but she usually came to stay with us for the winters), and friends and other family members, and her cooking – with lots of butter and other dairy products, as well as meat – was one of the things that made her happy.

In fact, what population scientists predict is that our generation and those that follow will not live as long as those who preceded us. Yet many more people now are vegetarians and vegans, lots of us are eating organics and getting our vegetables fresh from farmers’ markets rather than canned or frozen, which is what I mostly grew up on. (Smoked fish might be a delicacy now, but it was invented as a means of preserving fish in countries where without it, people would starve during the winter.) All evidence is that it’s the poisons in our environment, as well as in the foods that are mass-marketed, that pose such hazards to our health (and to be fair, Michael Pollan has helped to spread that awareness). That is, it’s the social problems created by corporate capitalism, not our individual taste for unhealthy foods, that are toxic. So the wisdom of the nutrition experts setting up their Wellness Clubs at Whole Foods should be contemplated carefully.

But my big revelation in what I have dubbed my Pumpkin Pie Moment is that I don’t care if I live as long as I possibly can. I hope I live another twenty years or more, I have a lot of things I want to do. But living as long as possible just isn’t my top priority. Being happy is. Not that there is necessarily a contradiction. A few months ago, I heard an interview with one of the researchers on The Longevity Project, a huge study begun in the [twenties] which followed a large cohort of Americans for their entire lives. Now that they are all dead (including the original researcher, Lewis Terman), a team has compiled information on what factors seem to yield the longest, most satisfying lives.

The shocker that’s grabbed the headlines was that Happiness Doesn’t Help. The people who were most “conscientious” or “responsible” lived longer than those who were carefree, thus ostensibly bursting the age-old assumption that stress and worry are bad for your health. Okay, that’s interesting. But the researcher I heard on the radio, Leslie Martin, used that information to advise parents not to worry if their kids are not making friends or having a good time, because they’ll be fine in the end.

Now I’m all for telling parents to stop measuring their kids against a one-size-fits-all playbook. But the fact that anxious, friendless kids may in the long run live longer than their happy, well-adjusted peers is not a good argument. Presumably, the parents of a seven-year-old are not deciding what is and is not a problem for her based on whether she’s going to live to be 84 or 88.

Now admittedly, when I read the study I found it more nuanced than it sounded in the interview. They measured not just how long people lived but how satisfied they were with their lives. And one of their points is that there was no behavior that determined who lived longest or had the most success, keeping in mind that all the participants in the study started out in fairly privileged circumstances. One of my secret ahas: no specific diet ended up yielding better results than any other in their study. The NPR story about the study is entitled, “It’s Not All About the Broccoli.” Alas, cruciferous vegetables, which I happen to love, according to this particular study at least, do not significantly prolong our lives.

I mentioned that to a coworker. She said a friend of hers who recently died from breast cancer said, “If I’d known I was going to die now, I wouldn’t have eaten all that broccoli.”

Well I’m going to keep eating broccoli, but I’m also going to keep eating pumpkin pie and ice cream. I’m also going to stop worrying so much about what other people think I should be doing, and if that doesn’t help me live longer, at least it’s going to make me happier.

This Thanksgiving, Give Thanks for Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-10T12:52:00.000-08:00

Five reasons to be grateful to those intrepid activists who trudged down to Wall Street with their tents on September 17:

1. Labor is back. Tuesday’s victory in Ohio, repealing the governor’s attack on public workers’ bargaining rights, has been hailed by union leadership as “one of the biggest victories in decades for a labor movement that has been on the defensive all year.” The fact is that the victory itself was pretty modest, but it was a rebuff to Gov. John Kasich and his buddy Scott Walker and the other Tea Party governors who just six short months ago were poised to trample the labor movement into the ground. When the outpouring in Wisconsin failed to stop the tide, the unions and their supporters seemed about ready to throw up their hands in defeat. The OWS movement, for all its ostensible “fuzziness” and lack of “concrete demands,” showed that something could be done. It’s like a cloud has lifted. You go to demonstrations and see people you haven’t seen since the first day of the Iraq War, if then. People are crawling out of their holes. I believe if this continues, some day we might see actual organizing in the private sector – though perhaps I’m overestimating the legs this movement is gonna have.

Photo of Oakland General Strike, from Planet Save

2. Protest is fashionable. I remember the last time that was true. It was in the eighties, the antinuclear days. If you were a protester, people wanted to know you. In 1983, I got invited to a wedding by people I hardly knew, because I had just gotten out of jail from the big Livermore Labs blockade. I was their celebrity protester. Media went around interviewing us about our (boring) lives for protester profile features. Now it’s like that again. The scruffy people I go off to meet on my lunch hour are not seen as a possible source of contagious diseases; rather, coworkers want to shake their hands so they can go home and tell their kids they met one of those Occupy people.

3. It’s a great time to be a political blogger. Enuf said. My twitter following is still pathetic, but hits on my blog are climbing. More to the point, there’s a lot of other stuff I want to read. Though #Occupy or #OWS are still not trending on Twitter.

4. People are debating nonviolence. I might rather everyone agreed about the value of nonviolent struggle, but at least people are thinking deeply, from Time Magazine to the movement itself (check out the videos from Occupy LA). A few great things I’ve read today:

in response to the police, it rests on being able to show that nonviolence works. Thanks to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, whose work I already quoted last week, we now have information at our disposal that can make this case. … The basic finding is that of 323 violent and nonviolent movements they analyzed between 1900 and 2006, 53% of the nonviolent ones succeeded as compared to only 26% of the violent ones. What's even more telling is that when the movements were repressed, the nonviolent movements were 6 times more likely to succeed.” (From Miki Kashtan’s blog and she gives the link to the full article.)

“Lack of agreements [about nonviolence] privileges the young over the old, the loud voices over the soft, the fast over the slow, the able-bodied over those with disabilities, the citizen over the immigrant, white folks over people of color, those who can do damage and flee the scene over those who are left to face the consequences.” (An Open Letter by Starhawk and other trainers)
“If there is any chance that nonviolence will be proclaimed as a strategy, especially in Oakland, especially

And by far the most ill-informed is this comment:

Non-violence doesn’t not work when your opponents are sadists.

Sorry, “indio007” but you are dead wrong about that (assuming "doesn't not work" was a typo). It’s precisely when your opponents are sadists that nonviolence works best. Ask the Freedom Riders. Or more to the point, ask the people who spent five hours blockading Wells Fargo a few weeks ago while the cops ignored us.

I went to the Occupy Oakland forum on property damage last Thursday, brought on by the confrontations following the General Strike. It was very interesting - 500+ people sitting in the cold and dark mostly respectfully listening to one another. Most people (though not all) spoke for some form of nonviolence, some for tactical or strategic reasons, others to protect the camp and those in it who are vulnerable. To me the most impressive was a guy who was part of the building occupation Wednesday night who critiqued his own group for setting a fire and building a barricade rather than locking arms and blockading with their bodies. That indicated to me that (some) people are thinking deeply and learning from one another.

5. Everyone’s learning to use twitter and text loops (well, almost everyone). A die-hard friend of mine was convinced to get a cell phone because she didn’t want to risk missing the call to come defend Occupy Oakland in the middle of the night.

General Strike! And Now What?

2011-11-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t a general strike, but it was pretty great.

marching to the Port of Oakland last night

At least 10,000 people came out to protest in Oakland yesterday, bringing a host of issues, sectors and tactics to make the demands of the 99% visible. It reminded me of the Shutdown of San Francisco in the first days of the Second Iraq War in 2003. The police, still hanging their heads over their outrageous aggression of last week and either under orders from or to embarrass Mayor Jean Quan, or both, kept an extremely low – read almost nonexistent – profile, allowing the windows of numerous banks and Whole Foods (all within a few blocks of my house) to be shattered. Walking home last night after the picket at the docks reminded me of nothing more than the streets of Seattle after the first day of the WTO in 1999. With the helicopters whirring overhead (they still are as I write this), it looked and sounded like a war zone.

KRON, our local NBC affiliate, reported that 41% of people responding to their poll said they were “all for the general strike,” and another 31% said it was “fine as long as it stays peaceful.” That means that a whopping 72% basically approve of it; of the rest, 17% said it was stupid because it wouldn’t do any good, while only 7% actively disapproved.

It’s almost enough to convince you that the revolution is coming.

The big question is, what comes next? Of course, I might know the answer if I had the strength to go back to Oscar Grant Plaza for the ten o’clock convergence, but I just can’t do it. My guess, if past movements are any guide (which, as I have previous suggested, they might or might not be), is that there will be two factions on that question. One will say, “We got ten thousand people [except they’ll probably say they had twenty-five; the city called it 4,500, which is both ridiculously low and ridiculously precise] this time; let’s do it again next week and we’ll get fifty thousand.” The other will say, “This was great, but we can’t repeat it; we need to deepen our approach. We can’t just keep protesting, we have to figure out what we’re FOR.” There will be those who want to focus on building the new society in the camp, and those who think they should be doing outreach to the community, to draw in the sectors who were not out today – and in fact, though the numbers were impressive, from what I saw on television and in person, there were a lot of communities missing from today’s actions.

The 99% movement also needs to be thinking about what the government’s next move is going to be. I don’t want to make anyone paranoid, but I predict the era of COINTELPRO is upon us. Last week, it seemed like the government strategy was going to be a simple one: crush and dismantle the camps one by one. It’s just a hypothesis, but it seems pretty likely that Homeland Security has been handing out more than Darth Vader costumes and stun grenades. The impressive display of interdepartmental cooperation at Oakland last week – 17 different police departments! – supports that theory; otherwise, mightn’t San Francisco and Berkeley have said, “No, we can’t come help raid Oakland, we have our own occupations to worry about”? And readers of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine will recognize the “shock and awe” approach favored by their counterinsurgency experts: go in in the middle of the night with overwhelming force and create as much chaos as possible in the first three minutes. The theory is supposed to be that that stuns people into submission. In the case of Occupy Oakland, it clearly didn’t, and that apparently was the root of the problem. They just didn’t imagine that people would regroup that day and come back out that night.

That strategy had to be scrapped because now mayors of cities like Santa Rosa are saying, “We don’t want to risk what happened in Oakland.” That statement is absurd on its face; as my friend Buff said, it’s like saying, “I’m afraid I might bomb you.” But if the people saying it are not calling the shots, it makes more sense.

So now that shock and awe are out of favor, I suspect the DHS plan is first to hope that the bad weather back east kills off OWS and ripples through the offspring, and failing that, various forms of destabilization. And let me just say that from what I’ve seen of Oakland and San Francisco, it wouldn’t take a counterinsurgency genius to destabilize these movements.

First of all, they are trying to use consensus, and even though most of them are using modified consensus, it’s a cumbersome and challenging process for a thousand or ten thousand people who don’t know each other and don’t have that much political unity. As a possible harbinger of things to come, at the SF general assembly (GA) the other day, apparently a few people objected that they didn’t realize they had agreed to modified consensus, and insisted on going back to “pure” consensus – whereby one person can block a decision. While I hope it isn’t, that could be a dangerous tool in the hands of someone wanting to wreak havoc.

What I saw when I got to OGP last night

Second, at least in Oakland and San Francisco, and I imagine in just about every large urban area, there are basically two camps. There are the political people, largely white, young and well educated, and then there are the homeless. There’s crossover and there are people that are not either of the above – especially now in Oakland, you have the professional organizers and people from other movements who were motivated by the crackdown to get involved, but I have really noticed that if you go to the camps in the middle of the day, you get one impression and if you go to the GA, you get a totally different view of who is there. And this is something that was mentioned at the SF GA the other night, when the subject of drug and alcohol use in the camp was raised.

Third, even within the “political class” at the camps, there are a lot of different stripes. There are anarchists and socialists and reformists and people who are not into labels. There are people who think the cops are part of the 99%, people who think the cops are the army of the 1%, and people like me who think if the cops want to be part of the 99%, they need to act like it. Even among anarchists, there are those who favor strategic property damage and provoking not-so-strategic confrontations with the police, and people who adhere to strict nonviolence, and everything in between. In those situations, it’s not very hard to sow discord. (Right after I finished writing this, I got a text message that the police were attacking the camp. When I got there, I found that a small group of men was setting fires and taunting the police, who were responding – unnecessarily but predictably – by firing tear gas and sound bombs into the camp, and threatening to arrest a much larger group of people who were only sitting on the sidewalk.)

So, how can the 99% Movement protect itself against destabilization? It’s not going to be easy. There’s no magic bullet. The first step is being aware of the potential. The second is guarding against paranoia and suspicion. If we start accusing everyone we don’t know or don’t like of being an agent, the government won’t need to send in any actual agents.

Here are a few things to think about:

Is someone who has recently shown up trying to take too much control? Especially, are they trying to control money?
Does someone always seem to be urging people to do things that will escalate the risk of confrontation with authorities? Do they get impatient or angry when anyone questions the strategic purpose of their proposals?
Is there anyone who always seems to be at the center of strong and hostile disagreements at general assemblies or working group meetings?
Is there someone who uses sexuality in a manipulative or aggressive way? Someone whom women, people of color or queer people say is behaving in an abusive or harassing way?
Is there someone your gut tells you not to trust, even if you can’t explain why?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, what should you do? Once again, I want to stress I don’t know the answer. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a group where a member was later revealed to have been an agent or infiltrator. But if I suspected someone, this is what I would do:

Talk to others I know I can trust, and see if any of them feel the same way.
Try to get information about the person I mistrust that can be verified, and see if it checks out.
Confront sexism, racism, bad process, shady dealings involving money in a principled and forthright way. Don’t let people sweep them under the rug but don’t make accusations I can’t defend.
Keep an eye on the person or people I mistrust. Be open to realizing that I’m probably wrong about them.
Listen if someone tells me that someone harassed or abused them, and be an ally. Stand up against abusive behavior no matter who the perpetrator is.
Try to remain friendly and open to new people. Don’t get sucked into a culture of suspicion.
Trust my instincts, but don’t worship them.

Some excellent things to read about COINTELPRO and infiltration:

Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party, by Ward Churchill and Jim Van der Wall. The best history ever of the COINTELPRO of the seventies, must read for activists (but it will make you never want to leave your house).

"Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence in Movements Enables State Violence", great article by Courtney Desiree Morris, initially published in the feminist journal make/shift.

"Informants, Infiltrators & Provocateurs", nice, pithy and practical.

The Movement and the Moment, Part IV – Movement Envy

2011-10-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

I’m a jumble of mixed emotions watching the events at Occupy Oakland and SF unfold.

First of all, I’m not there. A few weeks ago, I was dropping by regularly at both camps, but when all the drama came down, I was 150 miles away in beautiful Fort Bragg on a long-scheduled two-week writing retreat. Which, BTW, has been wonderful.

My fellow writer, with whom I’m sharing this lovely retreat courtesy of some generous friends who lent us their place here, is much younger and works for a labor organization. Her roommate was one of the people who was dragged off to Santa Rita andheld in solitary confinement on $10,000 bail the other day. Her friends were up all night Monday waiting for the raid in Oakland, and again on Wednesday at OccupySF. For her, the mixed feelings are about guilt that she isn’t there sharing the work and the risk.

For me, it’s pure jealousy. Not, of course, of the people who got shot in the head with teargas canisters or the ones who spent a day or three in jail. But of the people who got to feel that incredible power and solidarity of the actions themselves, especially what I heard and saw of Wednesday night’s march in Oakland, the vigil for the wounded activist, Scott Olson, the 3,000-person general assembly (though the report on the OO website says 1,607 people voted) Of hearing that the planned raid on Occupy SF was called off because of the massive outpouring of support by new and seasoned activists. Of the energy and joy that comes from having such unity of purpose, and of knowing that YOU DID IT. Even though if I were there, a part of me would still be whispering, “They did it, not me.”

I can’t help it – I have Movement Envy. It was supposed to be us, who got that rush of seeing everything you’ve worked for come true and then some. I’ve worked for thirty years for this, and I didn’t get it. Some people who started their organizing just a few short years ago, not because they were not committed but because they were not even born when I started my activist life, were the ones who lit the spark that caught. It’s not because they were better at it than we were, which is not to take away from their genius – but trust me, we had genius too. It’s because their timing happened to be good.

Now some of my friends will say that all the fruitless work we’ve been doing for years has laid the groundwork for this. There are small ways that is obviously true. The forms of direct democracy that are prevalent in the Occupy movement – facilitation and consensus and hand signals and not having identifiable (and arrestable) leaders – come out of the various anarchist and anarchofeminist movements of the seventies and eighties. People would not now be talking about affinity groups and spokescouncils if we had not used those forms in the antinuclear movement, and we would not have used them then if the Spanish anarchists – a tragically doomed movement itself – had not developed them.

But in the larger sense, I don’t think it is really true that all the work we did has any direct relationship to the success of Occupy Wall Street and its progeny. This movement – or these movements, hard to know which is accurate yet – grew out of the material conditions of their time, here and around the globe. People used forms that they had learned from older movements, but if those forms had not been there, they would have used others, and if there were no models they wanted to copy, they would have invented their own. The form didn’t create the movement; the moment did.

Two years ago, I asked, “What do you do when it’s not your moment?” I ask that again, but with very different meaning. What do you do when the potentially revolutionary moment comes and it’s not yours?

This movement is not about those of us who have been doing labor organizing, queer liberation, feminist, anti-militarist, international solidarity, even anti-capitalist or anarchist organizing for years. That’s what’s driving some organizers crazy. They have spent years crafting careful and creative and sometimes quite effective campaigns to stop foreclosures, to tax the rich, to hold banks accountable, to oppose social service cuts, to cut military spending, to defend labor – it’s all great, it’s all still important, but this movement is neither a product nor an extension of those campaigns. This is a parallel movement, with a different class base, a very different trajectory, and a different style. (If you doubt that, you might want to check out this blog about some conflicts that have arisen in DC, between the “Stop The Machine” protest and the Occupy DC encampment, or this one about tensions between "organizers and organized" at OWS.) The people who have been studying and researching and planning and writing and speaking about these issues are going to be infuriated a lot of the time because people are going to be talking about their issues who know a lot less and have put in a lot less sweat and soul than they have on them. I empathize. I’ve been there.

I’m also highly ambivalent about the general strike that Occupy Oakland has called for Wednesday. I don’t believe they can pull off anything like a general strike. 3,000 is a lot of people to come to a protest and meeting, but the adult population of Oakland is 300,000. Maybe that 1% (hey – you are now the 1%! but in truth, not all of the people who attended the GA the other night were from Oakland) can actually mobilize sufficiently in a couple days to multiply itself by 20 or 30 – I’m not going to say they can’t. What they’ve been able to do so far is pretty amazing. You can’t achieve big if you don’t dream big.

Calling for a general strike on such short notice seems to me to trivialize the cost to most workers of taking a day off from work, when you have no union to protect you, which the vast majority of private sector workers do not. (In 2008, the private sector unionization rate for San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose was 12.1%, which is a lot higher than I would have guessed; I know almost no one who is in a private sector union.) I also feel like people without significant roots in the labor movement thinking they can organize a general strike in a few days is kind of disrespectful toward the people who have been organizing labor for years, and haven’t been able to do that.

Now there is no way I can stay home from work Wednesday, having just been on vacation for two weeks. I also don’t work in Oakland, but that’s kind of a cop-out. My coworkers can’t do it either – they need the days off for when there's no school. We have better benefits than nearly everyone, and that means we get two days’ bereavement leave when a parent or child dies. But they wouldn’t do it if they could, even if they knew about it. Most of them, the five hundred or so people who work at the law firm where I word process, have never been to a protest. The didn’t strike when the amount they have to pay for their health benefits went up by 30%. They didn’t strike when 20% of our coworkers were laid off. The first political action they take is not going to be giving up a precious vacation day for something that, if it is important to them at all, is important for philosophical reasons. And less privileged workers don’t get vacation days at all. If they don’t go to work on Wednesday, they won’t get paid, which they cannot afford, or they could even get fired, which they definitely cannot afford.

A strike is not individual workers deciding to take a day off. A strike is a collective action based on some collective ability to insulate individuals from the consequences. This very audacious and well-intentioned and creative movement just doesn’t have that capacity yet. If they can get the transit workers on board – and I think their contract probably forbids it, so it’s a very tall order – so the buses and trains don’t run, then private sector workers who’ve never seen a union organizer will have a way to say that they couldn’t get to work. Without that, what you’re asking for is, at best, a boycott.

The Great American Boycott in 2006 was organized over several weeks, and at the time they called it, they had already had half a million people march for immigration rights in Los Angeles. And honestly, that was no general strike either. 200,000 marched in SF, but they came from all over the Bay Area. Business was scarcely interrupted except in heavily Latino industries.

I don’t want to be a professional nay-sayer. (You might say, well you’re doing an awfully good job of what you say you don’t want to do.) Remember, this piece is about Movement Envy. My experience of movements that are (maybe) very different from this one might be limiting my view of what’s possible. So OO and OSF and ODC and OCD, go ahead and reach for those stars. But at the same time keep in mind that many of us are still stuck down here on earth.

An Excellent Piece on Occupying and Organizing

2011-10-21T00:28:00.000-07:00

I'm not blogging this week or next, because I'm on a two week writing sprint to finish revising my second mystery. But before I left, I had started collecting some thoughts on the relationship between organizing and movement building, how they can inform each other, and how they differ. And just now I ran across this article by Rinku Sen from ColorLines that basically says a lot of what I wanted to say. So I'm off the hook!

Here's a teaser, followed by the link to the full article.

Occupying, Organizing and the Movements That Demand Both

by Rinku Sen

I have spent hours, weeks, months in discussions about how to recognize a movement—and whether anything we’ve done on all the issues you’ve mentioned counts. Suddenly, there are thousands of people taking some action, inspired by each other and seemingly not organized by anybody, and the conversation shifts to how we can harness the energy that has been released in that moment. Embedded in these discussions is an implicit assumption that one can build a movement in much the same way that one builds organizations: methodically, over the long term, with lots of structure so that people can join and find a path to leadership. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong.I have spent hours, weeks, months in discussions about how to recognize a movement—and whether anything we’ve done on all the issues you’ve mentioned counts. Suddenly, there are thousands of people taking some action, inspired by each other and seemingly not organized by anybody, and the conversation shifts to how we can harness the energy that has been released in that moment. Embedded in these discussions is an implicit assumption that one can build a movement in much the same way that one builds organizations: methodically, over the long term, with lots of structure so that people can join and find a path to leadership. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong.

... Read the rest

Abortion is back, but only on television

2011-10-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

I was behind on my television watching – all those marches and blockading Wells Fargo (pictured here, my four and a half hours wedged into a revolving door) got in the way – so I just saw the episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” where Cristina has the abortion. The whole way through, I was waiting for Owen to talk her out of it, or for her to suddenly realize, oh, I’m not too focused on my career to be a mother, I have always wanted a baby, Meredith’s right, let’s stay home and raise our kids together while our husbands save lives. I expected her to get called in to help on some emergency surgery on a child, and see the mom stroking the baby’s head and burst into tears, maybe even go running out of the room in a very un-Cristina-like way.

Of course they kept us in suspense for the whole show; last five minutes, she’s there on the table with Owen standing next to her and the doctor says, “I have to ask you one more time, are you sure you want to do this.” I thought, okay, this is it, she’s going to shake her head. I had a tomato in my hand, all ready to throw at the screen (and a cloth ready to wipe it off). She nodded. The doctor said, “All right, let’s get started.” The vacuum aspirator whirred to life along with the closing music and voiceover.

This was not the first television abortion I’ve seen recently. In the penultimate season, Becky had one on “Friday Night Lights.” That was even more surprising, because she was a teenager in Texas. And she didn’t die or slide into depression. She didn’t regret it. She even got her boyfriend back. Tami (the principal, who told her to talk to her mother and sent her to an options counselor) got fired over it, but that seemed pretty true to life and she got her old job as a guidance counselor back.

Is it possible that abortion is no longer “television’s most persistent taboo,” as Kate Aurthur wrote in 2004? Aurthur was talking about a show I never watched, “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” a Canadian teen drama where a character also had an abortion and did not regret it. But “Degrassi” was a cable show, and Viacom, which owns the channel that shows it in the U.S., opted not to air the episode until three years later. She referenced all the episodes where a strong, feminist character walks out of the clinic in the nick of time with her fetus intact – Andrea on “Beverly Hills 90210,” Miranda on “Sex in the City,” some others I never saw but I could add Susannah on “Thirtysomething.”

My personal favorite was “Party of Five,” where Julia miscarried just minutes before she’s supposed to leave for the clinic. I was volunteering on a women’s health hotline at that time, and I groaned, imagining all the girls sitting around waiting for their miscarriage instead of scheduling their abortions. Of course, I’m not a soap opera watcher, or my favorite would certainly be Erica’s reversed abortion on “All My Children.” And people said “The X Files” was creepy.

“Is abortion no longer too taboo for TV?” wrote Entertainment Weekly's JenniferArmstrong after yet another character on ABC Family’s “The Secret Life of an American Teenager” decided not to have the abortion. It does seem like the fear of backlash that kept the networks from portraying abortion as a legitimate option for 30+ years has waned. Observers have noted that the “Friday Night Lights” and “Grey’s Anatomy” episodes have drawn little fire from the right-wing.

So does the fact that the floodgates are now open mean that the political climate has shifted? Yes, but not in the way we might think.

The networks have not exactly been silent on the abortion issue since Bea Arthur’s “Maude” took the plunge in 1972. CBS did choose to air an implicitly anti-abortion ad during the 2010 Super Bowl, over the profuse objections of pro-choice activists. Cop shows have done numerous shows dealing with clinic bombings. Some have been pretty good, others ranged from stupid to offensive – often it turns out that the bombing was not politically motivated but was some desperate father’s way of preventing his wife or girlfriend from having an abortion – but all have been “balanced,” offering ample opportunity for the anti-choice people to expound.

One of the best, not surprisingly, was on “Cagney & Lacey” in 1985. The episode challenged assumptions by having Mary Beth Lacey, who was Catholic and pregnant with her third child, talk about having had an abortion at 19 (in Puerto Rico, since it was still illegal in New York). “Carol Altieri, CBS vice president for program practices, said her department took ‘special care’ to ‘flesh things out so that all points of view were prominent.’ Much of the right-to-life viewpoint is posed by actress Fionnula Flanagan, guest-starring as a pro-life activist,” reported the LA Times. Even so, the producers were so worried about backlash that they enlisted feminist organizations to help in a preemptive publicity campaign.

Ten years later, even a show like that would have been unthinkable on major network television.

In the aftermath of the “Cagney & Lacey” episode, Chicago Tribune columnist Stephen Chapman complained, “his week, officers Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey let down their audience by enlisting in the campaign to preserve abortion rights. The episode, revolving around the bombing of an abortion clinic, could have done justice to the opposing partisans and to the demands of television entertainment. Instead, it offered shrill propaganda….”

After a 2009 episode of “Law & Order” based on the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, the National Right to Life Committee’s website boasted, “In the end [the killer] is found guilty of the murder; but over the course of the episode a host of the arguments and issues surrounding abortion are covered in a manner unusually sympathetic to the pro-life cause... virtually every pro-life argument you knew you would never hear on a network program is a part of ‘Dignity’ [the episode’s title].

The fact is that by now the anti-choice battle has been nearly won. When “Maude” aired its controversial episode in 1972, abortion was legal in New York but not in most of the rest of the country; Roe v. Wade was about to be decided. In 2010 Gallup published a piece entitled, “The New Normal on Abortion: Americans More "Pro-Life.” For two years in a row, they reported, more respondents considered themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice,” after decades of the reverse.

But it’s not only, and not most importantly, in matters of public opinion that the anti-choice movement is secure. 88% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider, and a whopping 97% of non-metropolitan areas. More than two-thirds of states do not allow public funding to be used for abortion, and the rising cost and economic crisis puts it out of reach for most women who need it. Frivolous lawsuits and even criminal prosecutions set up byanti-abortion activists discourage new doctors from becoming abortion providers. Most states have parental notification laws for women or girls under 18, and many require parental consent (in some states, parents must be notified but do not need to consent - it's unclear, however, how many girls are able to access abortion over their parents' objections). Some states, including Texas, require the woman to see the fetal heartbeat on a sonogram before getting an abortion.

The anti-choice movement doesn't need to worry that teenagers who see "Friday Night Lights" will decide to end their pregnancies. If Becky were a real teenager in a small Texas town like Dillon, it's far more likely she would end up getting a sonogram at a fake abortion clinic (a clinic run by an anti-abortion group masquerading as an abortion provider) than that she would have actually gotten the abortion so easily.

No wonder there hasn’t been a big outcry over Cristina’s or Becky’s abortions. Television characters can get abortions now, but most real women cannot.

Understanding Movements: Extraordinary Times versus the Rest of the Time

2011-10-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

A friend who has been very involved in Occupy SF put on his Facebook status the other day that this movement has changed everything he thought about movement building. I suspect a lot of activists, especially younger ones, are feeling that way.

I’m not.

This 99% movement is amazing. It’s glorious. It’s so time for it. But it’s not The Movement. I hate to say it, but it’s not going to last.

I keep hearing people say it’s been 30 years since there was a movement this big. I don’t know where they’re getting that thirty year figure from, or if it’s just that the people who are saying it really mean 1968-72 and don’t want to admit that that was forty years ago. But in fact, there was a movement that was this huge and this amazing that started just about thirty years ago the antinuclear movement. In the summer of 1980, hundreds were arrested at dozens of actions that temporarily shut down nuclear power plants all over the country. Thirty years ago next year, a million people took to the streets of New York to demand a freeze on nuclear weapons. Between March of 1982 and June of 1983, we had over 3,000 arrests at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, where nuclear weapons are – sadly still -- developed. Many of the people arrested in those nonviolent protests spent two weeks or even thirty days in Santa Rita jail. We were The Movement then. Almost no one even remembers it.

Courtesy CISPES

In the mid-eighties we had another huge movement. It was called The Pledge of Resistance; I mentioned it in my last blog. Over 100,000 people signed pledges to do civil disobedience in opposition to U.S. aggression in Latin America, and thousands actually did it. In one week in 1985 there were 1,000 arrests across the country in hundreds of local actions.

Remember 2003? Millions of people around this country marched, as part of an international movement, to stop the Iraq war before it started. When that failed, tens of thousands took part in nonviolent direct action. Over 1,600 were arrested in San Francisco alone in the first three days. That was just eight years ago.

1999-2000 was the year of the “anti-globalization” (what I prefer to call global anticapitalist) convergences. It was the year of the Letter-Number-Code-Name actions: N30, A16, D2K (November 30, 1999 was the day 15,000 people, more or less, shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle; April 16 was the day 5,000 or so protested the International Monetary Fund/World Bank meetings in DC; Democratic Convention 2000 brought thousands to Los Angeles for heavily policed marches, concerts and the occasional sit-in.

Where are the people who created those movements? Some were students or youth organizers who have gone on to be the community organizers of today, working for nonprofits or unions on small-scale grassroots campaigns. Some burned out and went to graduate school, or became depoliticized. Some were among those who became inspired by Obama’s promise of hope and change, and some of those have since become disillusioned and depoliticized, while others have become radicalized and maybe are among those sitting in in parks across the nation. Some of us were long-time radicals then, and we’re still doing what we were doing before that – helping to fan the flames of whatever spark seems most promising. Today, it’s the 99% movement.

This movement has many things in common with all of those. It’s mobilized thousands of new activists and brought some people who haven’t been active in a while back into the streets. It’s organized on the principles of nonhierarchical direct democracy, which the media find infuriating and incomprehensible and people with jobs and busy lives find frustrating because it takes so long to make decisions. Like most, if not all, leaderless movements in this country, it does in fact have self-appointed and unacknowledged leaders and they tend to be white men. It’s plagued with racism and sexism which mostly stay bubbling under the surface, denied even by women, people of color and queer folks. It’s starting to have some divisions around issues like how confrontational to be with the police, whether it’s claiming to speak for people it doesn’t represent, and whether it’s hogging media coverage that rightly belong to other movements who can’t get any.

These are the tensions that tend to fragment and ultimately destroy movements. I certainly hope that this one will prove the exception, but it’s hard to imagine. For one thing, it’s about to be winter. There’s a reason that it was Arab Spring.

It would have been great if it had begun in June; that would have given it four months before it started to snow in New York and Chicago and pour endlessly in San Francisco. In fact, that was meant to happen, according to a very informative article on the organizing history of this spontaneous movement.

“Throughout April and May, members of A99 were organizing and debating possible future actions. They decided that Flag Day, June 14th, would be an appropriate time to launch actions. …

“On June 1st, this Anonymous call to action was published to AmpedStatus:

Acts of Resistance: What Are You Going To Do To Rebel Against Economic Tyranny?

…

On June 13th, it was announced that as part this day of action a group of people will occupy Liberty Park, a strategic public space closest to Wall Street and the New York Federal Reserve building. This Anonymous statement was released:

Activists to Occupy Financial District’s Liberty Park Until Demands Are Met – Operation Empire State Rebellion Begins…

With only 16 people showing up at Liberty Park, and only four prepared to occupy it, this part of the day’s actions were considered by some to be a disappointing failure. Though this intense form of civil disobedience didn’t gain enough support at that time, the many other actions happening throughout the day were very successful.”

The occupations have not yet met with severe repression. Yes, people have been pepper sprayed, yes, 700+ were arrested, but that’s not the type of repression that kills movements.

I mentioned the antinuclear movement. In June of 1982, 1200 people were arrested for blocking the entrances to Lawrence Livermore Labs in Livermore, California. They refused to give names and held jail solidarity until a deal was reached, which took a couple of days. Everyone was released in 2-3 days, after pleading guilty to jaywalking and being sentenced to time served. One year later, about the same number of people were arrested doing the same type of action. There had been numerous smaller actions during the year, and many of those activists had been sentenced to 30 days if they would not accept lengthy probation periods. But we believed that the large number at the June action, like the previous year’s, would make it impossible for the system to handle us for such a long time.

The men's tent, Santa Rita 1983 from my friend Luke Hauser's website

The two judges in that district took a hard line toward us. They wanted to quash the movement, which had not only organized actions at Livermore but had also disrupted tests of the MX missile at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and was aligned with other huge mobilizations in other parts of the country, like the nuclear weapons production site at Rocky Flats, Colorado. They insisted that we all accept two years’ probation or 45 days in jail. We sat in a makeshift prison camp composed of circus tents for nearly two weeks, and when a deal was finally struck, we all had to serve another four days in jail or pay a fine of $250. People lost jobs, missed kids’ birthdays, got kicked out of apartments because they couldn’t pay the rent. But we had had a great time together and gotten huge press. Daniel Ellsberg, who was among the arrestees, had debated the issue with District Attorney on ABC’s Nightline. When we got out, we said triumphantly that we would not be deterred, we were just getting started.

That was the last really big action at the Labs, which continue to develop weapons systems to this day. People had all kinds of reasons for not wanting to do civil disobedience again. Some felt that we had exhausted the utility of the tactic and needed to move into community organizing. Some felt we needed a legal strategy or to pressure policymakers. Some felt the whole nuclear issue was too liberal, and wanted to focus on opposing U.S. intervention in Central America or apartheid in South Africa. Some thought we should be working on the economic war in Oakland.

But people were also afraid. Most couldn’t risk being in jail another two weeks, or even longer. And for all the great reasons and ideas people had about what they were going to do instead, that would be more effective than symbolic actions, most of them didn’t follow through. Some did. Western States Legal Foundation was formed by a group who wanted to pursue a legal and policy strategy, and they are one of the leading antinuclear policy groups in the world today. TriValley Cares, which formed to do outreach and organizing in the Livermore area http://www.trivalleycares.org/, won the right to place an antinuclear exhibit in the visitor’s center at the Lab. They continue to organize, activate and educate to this day. Many of us took the skills we had learned in the Livermore Action Group into the Pledge of Resistance and later movements. But the fact is that the huge antinuclear direct action movement in California was crushed and the weapons continue to be developed and tested at Livermore.

I don’t say that’s going to happen to the 99% movement, but logic says it’s more likely than not. The media are going to lose interest, unless the tactics of the protests or the repression they face escalate. And if the tactics escalate, the repression is sure to follow. Capital and the government it controls are not going to just sit by and say, “Oh, well if people really want us to pay more, we will.” They will ignore the movement for a while, but if it seems like it’s picking up steam and not petering out, they’re going to move to crush it, and they’re probably going to succeed. Some of the activists will move to another level, and the rest will melt into the woodwork again, hopefully to come out another day.

And when that happens, the things people have learned about movement building during the times of less activity, when we’re sitting in rooms of a dozen people, calling 20,000 people to come out and getting 16, are going to be important. Those are what keep the tiny sparks alive so one of them can catch and ignite the flame.

This Day In History: Martial Law in the Castro

2011-10-06T20:00:00.000-07:00

I had my phone on silent last night so I missed the text telling me about the midnight raid (actually, it was about 10:50 pm) on the Occupy SF camp. Otherwise, I would have been very tempted to rush over there, as the occupiers were requesting that supporters do, but I’m actually not sorry I got a little more sleep. I dropped by on my way to work with a donation to help replace the tents, food and equipment the cops stole (they call it “confiscated”). Even the usually less-than-enthusiastic-about-protest San Francisco Chronicle seemed chagrined by the level of force deployed by the San Francisco Police to get rid of some theoretically illegal camping equipment that had been coexisting with downtown business for nearly a week.

These great photos are from Patrick Clifton's album.

It put me in mind of another infamous SFPD action, 22 years ago today. On October 6, 1989, ACT UP/San Francisco, the San Francisco chapter of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, held a demonstration that started at the San Francisco Federal Building on Golden Gate.

ACT UP, in case anyone does not remember or never knew, was another hell-raising movement that started in New York and spread around the country. But contrary to the myth told in the infinitely missable new movie “We Were Here” – which is supposed to be about AIDS in San Francisco but as far as every AIDS activist I know goes should be called “We Weren’t Here” – AIDS activism did not begin with ACT UP, “a group of creative young people from New York.” With all love and respect for our comrades in New York, I believe militant AIDS activism began right here in San Francisco, growing up in tandem with the “San Francisco service model,” affectionately known in some circles as the AIDS service industry. The first AIDS action group was called Citizens for Medical Justice (CMJ); it was an affinity group of about 20 or so people, including my friend Lisa, who did sit-ins at state and federal offices protesting mandatory testing of prisoners, closure of bathhouses, and FDA foot-dragging on approving treatments.

In late 1986, Lyndon LaRouche put an initiative on the California ballot calling for mandatory testing and various repressive measures against people with HIV/AIDS, possibly including quarantine. At the same time the racist group US English put the “English as the Official Language” initiative, known unofficially as “English-Only” on the ballot. While the mainstream Bay Area gay organizations, under chairmanship of Chris Bowman of the Log Cabin Republicans, were focusing myopically on the LaRouche initiative, a bunch of more left-leaning queer folks started a coalition called Stand Together, which worked to defeat both initiatives. As part of that effort, the AIDS Action Pledge was born. Taking its approach from the Pledge of Resistance, which organized thousands around the country to do civil disobedience in response to U.S. aggression against Latin America, AAP collected signatures on a pledge that began, “I pledge to join others in fighting for all our lives and liberties during the AIDS crisis.” Soon after the LaRouche initiative was defeated (English-only, sadly and not surprisingly, was passed), AIDS Action Pledge staged the first protest at the South Bay headquarters of Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline), the manufacturer of the sole AIDS treatment, AZT, demanding that they lower the price of the drug. A few months later, after meeting with members of ACT UP (then only in New York) and other AIDS activists from around the country at the 1987 March on Washington, the AAP changed its name to ACT UP/SF.

Flash forward two years, and ACT UP/SF had probably 70-100 active members in three working groups: Treatment Issues, Local Issues and State and Federal Issues. There were also a women’s caucus, the Bayard Rustin Anti-Racism Collective and the People With Immune System Disorders (PISD) Caucus. Each group had organized a number of very successful actions, educational events, fundraisers and outreach efforts. Friday night, October 6, was to be our biggest street protest – each working group planned an action for somewhere along the route of the march, which was to go from the Federal Building to City Hall to the State Building, calling out the ways that part of the government was failing to stop the dying. It would end at Market and Castro, where Local Issues had planned a grand finale – spraypainting silhouettes on the sidewalk of the Castro to create what they called the “Permanent Quilt,” a subtle dig at the Names Project which many of us felt had gone from a powerful protest to a kind of a feel-good way of beautifying the epidemic.

I can’t remember what my group, State and Fed, had planned at the Federal and State Buildings. I do remember that I was worried the demonstration was not going to be interesting enough to keep people engaged. I was also worried no one would come. When I got near the Federal Building, I was excited because I could see there were a lot of people there already. As I got closer, I saw that half of them were cops. Cops in riot gear. My friend Ken Jones, who was director of the Stop AIDS Project, was sitting on a low wall at the edge of the building, smoking. When I greeted him, he said, “I think every one of us will have our own personal pig.” (I’ve never liked that word, but Ken was from the Vietnam generation – about ten years older than me.)

We did whatever we did at the Federal Building. I have this feeling it might have involved hanging a banner on the doors and a die-in on the plaza. Someone made a speech. We headed out to Van Ness. The energy was high. We chanted and banged on drums. I was happy because my responsibilities were done and I could relax and have fun. As we stepped into the street on Van Ness, the police captain started droning, “Obey all traffic laws.” The light turned red. People were still in the street, crossing slowly toward the State Building. The cops lowered their shields and started swinging at people. One of the organizers, Bill Haskell, turned to argue with them, saying that we were just trying to get across the street. They grabbed him and threw him to the street, kicked him, cuffed him and threw him in a van.

The rest of the march was like that. Any time anyone stepped into the parking lane or took too long crossing the street, they got hit. All the way to the Castro we were hemmed in on the sidewalk, with motorcycles on one side and lines of foot cops on the other. When we got there, some of us decided to sit down in the street, making an old-fashioned blockade. It seemed like the only way to de-escalate without just giving up and going home, which we were not going to do. A few dozen of us sat down and linked arms and chanted. Local Issues started painting the Permanent Quilt.

We were sitting there, waiting to be arrested, and suddenly we saw cops running and swinging batons at people. We, the blockaders, were already surrounded and couldn’t go to help or see what was happening. We heard people screaming, and I saw someone fall. He ended up being taken to the hospital and needing stitches. He, along with a few others who were injured, ended up winning $250,000 in a lawsuit against the City. One blockader, Frank, went limp and accidentally kicked one of the cops. They beat him up and charged him with battery; it eventually turned out he had an outstanding warrant and he would be in jail for several months. I didn’t see the rest because I was arrested, but I heard about it from some of the people who were arrested later, and from incredulous friends when I got out.

The cops declared martial law (seriously, they called it that). According to an article in the Bay Area Reporter written two years ago on the 20th anniversary, “As the police began to arrest those blocking the street, someone knocked over a police motorcycle and the situation quickly escalated.” That was the first I heard of the motorcycle theory, but something had to explain it. The police captain told people to get inside and announced that anyone on the street would be arrested. The Castro Theater and some businesses like Orphan Andy’s diner on 17th opened their doors so refugees could get in. Others locked their doors to keep out the riffraff. People were hurled into the street, beaten and arrested. A woman’s arm was broken when she tried to write down a cop’s badge number. A few people who never had anything to do with the protest, who were just going to dinner or to get a video were busted. It was hardly the first time that had happened – it happened all the time in the eighties, but it was the first time in a long time it had happened in the Castro, and usually it was when we were protesting a high powered event, like the Democratic Convention in 1984, Henry Kissinger’s speech at the Hilton Hotel or a visit from president bush. This was just your basic night in the Castro.

ACT UP finally regrouped and took back the street. In this video, you can hear the cops announcing martial law and then you can hear my friend Deeg giving a speech and leading a march out of the Castro.

We never knew why they did it. We speculated that it was retaliation for an action a few weeks before, when another AIDS action group briefly (and gloriously) disrupted the opening night at the Opera. That action was organized by Stop AIDS Now Or Else, which had some overlapping membership with ACT UP, but most people thought it was ACT UP. Some people thought the motivation for the crackdown was that ACT UP had taken a stand against building a new stadium in downtown San Francisco with taxpayer money, which was favored by Mayor Art Agnos. We did hear later that the local gay beat cop, nicknamed “Pig in a Wig” because of his hairstyle, had gone around to all the businesses that day and told them that “ACT UP was coming into the neighborhood to make trouble,” and that the cops were going to protect them. We never found out, and probably never will, if any of the businesses gave their approval to the crack-down.

The next day, a few of us from ACT UP were invited to meet with the police chief, Frank Jordan, who became mayor two years later, and his new LGBT liaison, Lt. Lea Militello. They hemmed and hawed and said the attack was a mistake. That night, we held a triumphant march through the Castro. This time, it was the media that nearly outnumbered the marchers, who numbered in the thousands.

A lot of things have happened on October 6 over the years. “The Jazz Singer” (first talkie) opened, Bette Davis died, Milosevic resigned as president of Yugoslavia, Babe Ruth set a record for home runs in a World Series, Louis XVI returned to Paris from Versailles after being confronted by the Parisian women, the 13 Martyrs of Arad were executed after the Hungarian war of independence (who knew?). Maybe in future years October 6 will be known all over the world as the day the U.S. Tahrir Square began in Liberty Park in Washington, D.C. But for me, like many Bay Area activist queers, October 6 will always mean martial law in the Castro.

We Were Also Here!

Five Great Things About the Occupy Movement

2011-10-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

As I was walking to lunch the other day, I heard the unmistakable tones of someone droning through a bullhorn. I assumed it was the picket line at the Hyatt Regency, but as I got nearer, I realized it was coming from the other side of the street, by the Federal Reserve building.

The Fed is, in my opinion, the most underprotested building in San Francisco. I always try to convince people to demonstrate there, and they inevitably opt for what they think of as more direct corporate enemies, like Bechtel or The Carlyle Group, or government buildings like the Federal Building (boring!), ICE Headquarters or the ultranondescript South of Market office building housing Homeland Security.

People don’t target the Fed because they don’t understand what it does. I don’t either, but I do know this: its job is to keep American capitalism from collapsing, by manipulating the currency supply and the interest rates. In fact, this is what the Federal Reserve’s website says its responsibilities are:

Conducting the nation's monetary policy by influencing money and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of full employment and stable prices.
Supervising and regulating banks and other important financial institutions to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation's banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers.
Maintaining the stability of the financial system and containing systemic risk that may arise in financial markets.

In their own words, this whole mess is the Fed’s fault because it didn’t do its job.

Plus it’s across the street from my job, so I always want people to be demonstrating there. And now they always are. Hallelujah.

The people droning through the bullhorn were, it turns out, a very small cadre of the Occupy SF movement. Inspired by their fellows on Wall Street, an unemployed lawyer called Belle Starr, and a heavily tattooed guy in fatigues, had set up a dozen or so signs, some on the ground, some propped up facing the street, with messages like “Being in Debt Doesn’t Make You Rich,” and “Make the Banks Pay.” Instead of pushing leaflets at uninterested people like I always do, they had stacks of information sheets sitting on the ground for people to pick up if they wanted. There was a small stack of DVDs too, featuring video from protests in New York and here. I took one, and put a small donation in their donation jar. Belle told me they were going to be there every day, and that there are General Assemblies every day at 6:00 pm in Justin Hermann Plaza.

One day after work, I happened to run into the GA, which inexplicably had moved to the sidewalk in front of the Fed. There were about 50 people in a circle, surrounded by posters saying things like “We Are the 99% and So Are You” and “People Not Profits.” Everything that anyone said, the crowd would repeat so that people who were not near the speaker could hear. I had seen the Wall Street protesters on TV using that method to amplify Michael Moore’s speech to the occupation there, but I have to say, in this case I thought it was a bit of overkill; if people had gathered a little closer in, everyone should have been able to hear. But it is obvious that they are learning a particular method of organizing from the other groups that are their inspiration, and it’s a unifying cultural phenomenon.

Thursday was a demonstration in the financial district, but I couldn’t go because it was Rosh Hashanah and I was having ten people over for dinner. A friend of mine went and said there were about 500 people there, mostly students, but that the turnout was better than the organization; there was no plan for what to do once they marched over to Chase. That’s been true of some of the Uncut actions I’ve been to here as well. It’s a frequent byproduct of extreme anarchist philosophy that people sometimes resist even the level of leadership that means someone makes sure that there will be banners and signs, a route, and something for people to do once they show up. Sometimes people take the initiative and the demos are great, but if no one takes responsibility on their own, there may be no mechanism for plugging the holes.

According to the Occupy website, Occupy SF has three loci. There’s a night camp at Howard and Spear, just south of the building where I work. I’d noticed that the block between Howard and Mission on Main, across from the Fed, seems to be one where homeless people are able to camp without being disturbed, and I guess that is true on the other side of the Fed as well. Not sure why, but it sure is picturesque. The “permanent camp” is at Justin Hermann during the day – I guess they can’t stay there at night or they’d get shooed out or arrested. In front of the Fed is what they call the Front Line. They have General Assemblies on Saturdays at 4 pm in Union Square, except when they move them to another time and/or place. (All this is very subject to change so before you go anywhere, check their site.)

So far I haven’t had time to participate in this nascent local movement, nor will I be able to in the foreseeable future, but I’m really enthusiastic about it. I ask myself if it’s just because they’re hanging out at my favorite target. I don’t think so. Here are the things I love about the Occupy movement:

1. The use of simple cardboard signs. Even though there were only two people hanging out on the Front Line the two days I walked by, it looked like a bigger deal because of the artful use of signs. Some were facing the street, some were laid on the ground, so you didn’t need people carry them the way you would if they were picket signs. Of course it helped that this was the hottest week of the year and there was no wind to speak of. We’ll see how it works when the weather changes, but I like the look.

2. They are more focused on longevity than size. I’ve always been a big believer that the way you build a movement is by doing something consistently and growing little by little. So often in this country, all the focus is on “How many people did you get?” We think anything that isn’t huge is nothing, and it’s more important to get 50,000 views on YouTube than to get 50 people to come to an action. Last week, some friends were talking about the Direct Action to Stop the War shutdown of San Francisco on March 20-23, 2003, and I suggested that one reason the antiwar movement fizzled out in this area was that we had 20,000 people those first few days and very shortly after that we had trouble getting 100 or 200 people at a demonstration. If you start really small, you have nowhere to go but up.

3. It is spreading around the country, but each local group seems rooted in the community of people who can make the commitment. Okay, so I haven’t been able to participate much yet. That’s okay, because I’m not really the constituency of this movement. I like it, I identify with its anarchist process and its anticapitalist goals, but I’m not an underemployed 20-something. The Tahrir Square uprising and its counterparts in North Africa and Europe did not happen because middle-aged people with good jobs suddenly decided to risk everything by camping out in the squares. They started with the people who could afford to camp out in the square because they had nowhere else to go – young, unemployed people. And we have plenty of those people here, and this is their movement. Those of us who have jobs and families and other commitments can participate by feeding them, publicizing their actions through media or social media, talking about them at work, cheering for them when we walk or drive by.

4. They are not waiting for some organization or famous person to tell them what to do. They’re not agonizing about where to get funding. They might not know what they’re doing, but at least they’re doing it. It’s not some old left groups pretending to have a base they don’t, and it’s not nonprofits deciding who should be invited and who shouldn’t be. It’s not faux spontaneous. It’s messier than it would be if ANSWER or EBASE were organizing it, but it’s messy because it really IS spontaneous.

5. I keep hearing people say “We have to get off our computers and come out into the streets.” And they are!

A state without a state - Part II - When Is a State Not a State?

2011-09-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

When is a state not a state? When it’s called Palestine.

It’s ironic on so many levels that the “unilateral” action of President Mahmoud Abbas in going to the U.N. to ask for Palestinian statehood is so roundly condemned by the U.S. and the Israeli government.

First, it’s not unilateral, at least not with regard to the international community. It’s precisely the opposite. Abbas and others in the Palestinian Authority traveled to many countries in the last year, rounding up the support they needed for a multilateral declaration of statehood, and he made his request to the ultimate multilateral body – the United Nations. It’s only “unilateral,” as I explained in my last post, with regard to the Palestinian people, who have expressed no mandate for seeking statehood for some Palestinians while permanently sacrificing the rights of others. The fact that the U.S. and Israel don’t agree that this – or any other time – is a good time for Palestinian autonomy doesn’t make it “unilateral,” it merely makes it not subservient to U.S.-Israeli interests.

Second, the Israeli government has always been a big fan of unilateral actions. Establishment of more than 120 settlements housing half a million Israeli citizens on Palestinian land has been the biggest one, pursued by every Israeli government since 1967 (or really since 1949, when Israel claimed territory it had conquered in the war that followed the U.N. declaration which declared its borders). It’s a supreme irony that one of the bases on which Israel today claims that Palestine has no right to statehood is its failure to “establish clear borders,” when it is Israel that has been whittling away at Palestinian borders for sixty-three years. [Huge shout out to my friend Henry Norr for getting NPR to publish on its website, “In two stories posted on npr.org in less than a year, NPR has underestimated the number of Israeli Jews living in settlements in the West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem. NPR was wrong simply because the source it used – the much-respected CIA “World Factbook” – is wrong on that point and has been for several years.” I stumbled on that when I was checking to make sure my numbers were accurate – which they were.]

Remember unilateral disengagement? This was the comatose former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan for withdrawal from Gaza in recognition that the “Roadmap to Peace” championed by the Quartet – U.S., European Union, Russia and U.N. had failed. Sharon announced the plan in December 2003, saying “…if in a few months the Palestinians still continue to disregard their part in implementing the Roadmap then Israel will initiate the unilateral security step of disengagement from the Palestinians.”

Though at first, the Bush administration condemned the move in language very similar to the Obama administration’s statements on Abbas’s initiative: “The United States believes that a settlement must be negotiated, and we would oppose any effort -- any Israeli effort to impose a settlement.” (statement by Scott McClellan, December 18, 2003)¸ four months later the administration “caved in” to the fact that Israel could not be dissuaded and supported the plan, which was carried out with great fanfare in the summer of 2005.

So why must unilateral actions by Israel be “dissuaded” and eventually acceded to, and “unilateral” pronouncements – with no action to back them up – by Palestinian leaders punished with cutting off aid? Especially when Israel receives five and a half times as much U.S. aid as the Palestinian Authority - $3 billion compared with $550 million this year?
We don’t really need to answer that.

Third, Palestinian statehood has already been declared twice by the international community, so what Abbas is asking for is nothing new. As Salman Abu Sitta, one of the leading Palestinian historians, points out,

The League of Nations acknowledged in Article 22 of its Charter the independence of Palestine from the sea to the river, and from Ras al Naqura to Um Rashrash, and placed it under category A Mandate, like Iraq; that meant an independent state which only needed assistance and advice from the Mandate government to build its institutions. Iraq was Palestine's twin, with the difference that Iraq became an independent state; and Palestine did not.

The British Mandate undermined these legal foundations by admitting Jewish immigrants to Palestine and not allowing Palestinian parliamentary representation as long as the majority of the population of Palestine were Arabs. Then the Zionists undermined the whole foundations by occupying Palestine in two stages, in 1948 and 1967.

United Nations Resolution 181, approved on November 29, 1946, specified that:

Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948. [my emphasis]

It’s irrelevant that the name of “Palestine” for the “Arab state” was not included in the resolution; the name “Israel” was not used either. And obviously, that has not meant that Israel did not exist.

But the final and deepest irony is that if United States Ambassador Susan Rice sat on her hands and did not veto the Palestinian statehood resolution in the Security Council, it would give Israel exactly what she has always claimed to want – more, in fact, than any of the so-called peace plans that Israeli governments have offered. A state of Palestine recognized by the UN today, would be, as Abu Sitta and Ali Abunimah and many others have pointed out, a disconnected, dysfunctional state on less than 22% of the land that Palestinians were peacefully inhabiting in 1947 (less than 22% because the 22% figure, quoted by Abbas in his speech, comes from 2000 http://www.palestine-pmc.com/pissue/borders.asp and predates Israel’s Apartheid Wall which has expropriated up to 46% of the West Bank).

Such a state would have no way of surviving but by providing cheap labor to Israel’s settlement industries, which are constantly being expanded despite alleged plans to dismantle the settlements. (I participated in a flash mob publicizing one such settlement industry – SodaStream – a couple weeks ago; watch my fun video of it.)

Israel would, presumably, continue to control all the water and mineral resources under the ground, just as it now does, as well as the air space above, meaning that anything like cellphone towers or cable television that the Palestinian government wanted to provide would have to be negotiated with Israeli authorities.

Palestinian refugees would have nowhere to go, permanently exiled unless the tiny Palestinian state could make room for them and find a way to get them home – given, as just mentioned, that Israel controls the air space.

Palestinians would not be able to visit their holy sites in Jerusalem, just as they cannot now. Settlement construction would, presumably, continue unabated in East Jerusalem.

So you would think the Israeli government would be dancing for joy at the prospect of getting U.N. recognition for this plan which would reward every aggressive move it has made since 1948 and dress it all up as a great deal for the Palestinians. And maybe they are, really, but in an op-ed last week, Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel who belatedly came out for “peace” on his way out of office in 2008, (re)articulates the difference between what the Palestinians are offering and what is demanded:

“the Palestinian state would be demilitarized and it would not form military alliances with other nations.”

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reiterated this call for Palestinian demilitarization in his speech at the U.N.

Now I’m all for demilitarization. If Israel wants to dismantle its army, of which nearly every adult male under 50 is part (well, that’s the theory – in practice, only about 20% actually are), give back the nearly $3 billion of U.S. tax money that our government sends it for weapons every year, dismantle the nuclear weapons it won’t confirm or deny that it has, take down all the checkpoints it will have no soldiers to staff and replant the Palestinian olive trees it uprooted for all the security roads it won’t need for jeeps and armored personnel carriers, I’ll be the first to demand that the Palestinians dismantle the twelve different security forces it’s built with help and encouragement from successive U.S. administrations.

Otherwise, I don’t really see how Israeli Prime Ministers can say this with a straight face. Go back and look at UN Resolution 181 – and note that link is to the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s own web page. It may have given the Jewish state 56% of the land, but it didn’t give them the right to have all the guns.

A state without a state, Part I – Who Is “The Palestinians”?

2011-09-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

This was going to be my definitive piece on the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood, but I got distracted by arcania about the PLO, so four pages in, I decided to make this Part I.

The Palestinians, so we hear, are going to the United Nations this week to demand recognition as a state. Something many people would say they should have done at least twenty if not sixty years ago.

Now let’s get one thing clear: if they get it, whether from the Security Council, which will not happen because the U.S. has promised to veto it, or from the General Assembly, which seems likely, it will not make any discernible difference on the ground. The Israeli tanks will not pack up and leave their bases in the West Bank, Apache helicopters and Heron drones will not stop assaulting Gaza whenever they feel like it, Israeli border guards will not abandon their posts along the Apartheid Wall inside the Green Line, officially recognized as Palestinian land. Life on the day after statehood will be exactly like life on the day before, a condition of change without change Palestinians have become very accustomed to in the 18 years since Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Yassir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn.

The fact that it will not change life as they know it is only one reason that many parts of Palestinian civil society, contrary to what you may have heard, are not enthused about, or even in favor of, the demand for statehood.

The Boycott National Committee, which was formed in 2007 to direct the international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel and includes representatives of 20 of the largest Palestinian organizations, said in a statement issued in August:

The Western-backed Palestinian Authority’s (PA) effort to seek UN recognition of “statehood” unilaterally, without consulting the Palestinian people from which the PA has absolutely no mandate, has raised fears among Palestinians that the move could actually harm Palestinian rights.

If the UN votes to admit the “State of Palestine,” it is likely that the unelected representatives of the Palestinian Authority would be seated in the General Assembly instead of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which currently holds the Palestine observer seat at the UN.

As the above makes plain, one of the problems is who is asking. The only entity which has the right to represent the Palestinian people at the U.N. is the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. So officially, that’s who’s asking. It’s a plausible claim, because Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, is also Chairman of the PLO. Abbas inherited both positions when Arafat died, and he continues to occupy them because he and the PLO leadership put the scheduled elections for both on indefinite hold in 2009. Most factions of the PLO have publicly come out in support, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the largest of the left-wing parties (best known for the 1969 hijacking of a TWA jet led by Leila Khaled). Hamas and the other Islamic parties, as well as PLO leaders such as former Minister of Information Nabil Amr, have come out against it.

Most of us know little to nothing about the PLO. Growing up I knew only one thing: that its original charter called for “driving the Jews into the sea.” Many Zionist propagandists continue to assert that (see, for instance, a quote from Daniel Gordis’s 2000 essay “Home to Stay" or “The Truth About the Palestinian People”), while some allow as how that clause was dropped or amended in 1993, when Arafat agreed to begin the Oslo process. I’ve now read the original charter, which was signed in 1968, four years after the PLO was formed by the Palestine National Council. It’s officially called the Palestine National Charter. Here are the only things it says about Jews:

“Article 6: The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” [That’s not an idle promise; I know Jewish Palestinians]

“Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.”

There’s a very interesting article by William James Martin in Counterpunch on the origins of the phrase “drive the Jews into the sea.”

What the charter does say is that:

“Article 15: The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national (qawmi) duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.

“Article 22: Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-a-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian people look for the support of all the progressive and peaceful forces and urge them all, irrespective of their affiliations and beliefs, to offer the Palestinian people all aid and support in their just struggle for the liberation of their homeland.

“Article 23: The demand of security and peace, as well as the demand of right and justice, require all states to consider Zionism an illegitimate movement, to outlaw its existence, and to ban its operations, in order that friendly relations among peoples may be preserved, and the loyalty of citizens to their respective homelands safeguarded.”

The clauses calling for “elimination of the Zionist presence” – i.e., the state of Israel – were repealed in 1996, when, according to the website of the PLO Mission to the UN, “On 21 April, the Palestine National Council (PNC) holds its twenty-first session in Gaza City in Palestine for the first time since 1964, and decides by majority vote to “abrogate the provisions of the PLO Charter that are contrary to the exchanged letters between the PLO and the Government of Israel of 9 and 10 September 1993.” That’s one reason – possibly the only reason – Hamas and the other Islamic parties are not members of the PLO.

So Who Is the PLO?

As explained in a memo (released as part of the "Palestine papers") written by Mazen Masri for the PLO Negotiation Support Unit in 2006, “The PLO was initially founded by Arab states in 1964 in order to deal with the Palestinian national cause. It was controlled by Arab states till the late 1960s when the Palestinian factions gained more representation in the PLO. In 1969, the late Yasser Arafat, then Head of Fateh faction was elected Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee. Ever since then, the PLO became the umbrella organization for most of the Palestinian factions, and is widely acknowledged as the embodiment of the Palestinian national movement.” (I have to say, I just love that the PLO has researchers writing them memos about their own history. Maybe certain members of the U.S. Congress and former governors of Alaska could take a lesson from them.)

The PLO is a coalition of ten organizations. Fatah, the party founded by Arafat, is the largest, followed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Palestinian People’s Party (PPP, formerly the Palestinian Communist Party), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Most of the other six are split-offs from one of the original factions. In the last Palestinian legislative council elections, the DFLP, PPP and a smaller faction, the Palestine Democratic Union, ran candidates together as al-Badeel, The Alternative.

Officially, the highest authority in the PLO is the Palestine National Council, or PNC. The Masri memo calls it “the parliament for all Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Jerusalem.” It elects the 18-member Executive Committee, which makes day-to-day decisions. So far so good. The problem? The PNC didn’t meet for thirteen years, for elections or anything else. They finally met in late 2009, primarily for the purpose of replacing six dead members of the Executive Committee.

To complicate matters further, Masri explains, under an elections law that was enacted in 1995 by the PA, the members of the Palestinian Legislative Council – the Parliament of the Palestinian Authority, would become members of the PNC. This, presumably, was a step on the path of substituting the PA for the PLO. Under that provision, 1) there would be a PNC that had been elected in this century, and 2) a bunch of Hamas legislators would automatically become members of the highest body of the PLO, which would be interesting. But, alas, that law was repealed in 2005, prior to the elections which swept Hamas into power.

The PLO’s obligation is to represent all Palestinians in the world, not only those in the West Bank and Gaza or even inside the borders of historic Palestine. So any decision about statehood, if it’s coming from the PLO, would need to be consented to by the refugee population, which is almost twice the size of the Palestinian population inside the country, and presumably they will not accept any solution that does not guarantee their right to return to Palestine. It also needs to satisfy the aspirations of Palestinians living within the 1948 borders of Israel for full equality as citizens of whichever country they choose to belong to (or both), and that is not possible as long as Israel defines itself and is internationally recognized as a Jewish state.

In practice, the decision to go to the U.N. seems to have been made by the Palestinian Authority leadership, which overlaps with, is close to and at times indistinguishable from the PLO. But there are key differences between the two bodies.

Who Is the Palestinian Authority?

The Palestinian Authority was created by the Oslo accords as part of the transition to statehood which never took place. There have been four rounds of PA elections – two legislative and two presidential. All have been marked by nearly unparalleled fairness, and the only curtailment of freedom has come from the Israeli authorities, who in the last round arrested both candidates and voters in order to ensure that Palestinians in East Jerusalem, who are entitled to vote for the PA, did not have the opportunity to do so.

The PA, unlike the PLO, represents only the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, not those in the 1948 areas and not those outside the country.

Moreover, the PA leadership is also at this point basically self-appointed. Presidential and legislative elections which should have taken place two years ago, were cancelled in the wake of the U.S.-backed coup attempt against the Hamas government and never rescheduled. In the early months of the “Arab Spring,” Abbas announced that local and legislative elections would be held this fall, and Hamas – which won the last round of legislative elections but is considered unlikely to win the next – condemned the unilateral move. As part of the unity agreement was reached in Cairo in April, both factions agreed to postpone the elections, apparently united in their fear of the people’s will.

So any effort now for the PA, over the protests of Hamas and members of Palestinian civil society, to take its statehood demand to the U.N., looks like a power grab by the PA, which will permanently separate Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from those in the 1948 borders of Israel and most of East Jerusalem, and permanently disenfranchise the refugee population. There has even been speculation that Israel and the U.S. are only pretending to oppose the bid, in hopes that that will encourage the Palestinians to support it, since if it succeeded, it would give them exactly what they have been clamoring for.

Next time: When is a state not a state?

Confessions of a Bookaholic

2011-09-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

On July 4 weekend, I decided to stroll up to Walden Pond, my local (about a mile away) progressive independent bookstore. One of my goals was to find interesting authors to interview on Women’s Magazine, and I did – a couple weeks ago, I interviewed the highly entertaining and knowledgeable Leonard Sax, whose book Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls seemed really on point to me. I especially liked the sections on sexuality and the “cyberbubble.” Dr Sax agrees that “crisis” is kind of melodramatic – he explained that noncelebrity authors don’t get to pick their titles. But the problems he identified correspond to the ones that most of the teenage girls I know (and their parents) are dealing with.
I picked up the Sax book and headed to the counter, but on the way, of course I had to stop by the Staff Picks table. Oh my Goddess. There was a Maisie Dobbs I hadn’t read. Okay, that was a no-brainer. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Someone in a writing class I had just taken was naming Jennifer Egan among her favorite writers. Plus anything that has goon squad in the title is sure to be up my alley. As it turns out, it was and wasn’t. But I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t bought it.

Thanks to zimpenfish, whose room looks
even worse than mine

I stuffed my new books in my version of Hermione Granger’s infinitely expandable purse and headed home, one shoulder drooping with the weight. Wait, what’s that? A box of free books, lurking by the side of a ramshackle apartment building. I tried to make myself walk by, but then a little voice said, “You just spent $40 on books, and you’re going to turn down free ones? What kind of American are you?” There were some mysteries by writers I like – a Nevada Barr, a Linda Barnes, and a historical mystery about Tudor England with a blurb by P.D. James – couldn’t resist. I added four or five to my bag and stumbled home in danger of becoming a hunchback (the protagonist of the Tudor England book, which I’m reading now, is a hunchback).

Fortunately, a few years ago, someone left a disassembled Ikea bookcase in my storage space. She was going to come get it in a few days, but she never did. When I moved, I took it with me, even though I wasn’t sure I would be able to figure out how to put it together or that I would have a place for it if I did. I decided the time had come to break it out. I figured out what little parts I needed that I didn’t have and went to Ikea and picked them up and came home and managed to assemble it without too much difficulty – you’ve met one Ikea cabinet, you pretty much know them all. Cool. Now I had six new shelves to fill. I unpacked the last box of books that had been waiting in my new house for a home and then stacked all my new books on the remaining shelves and STILL had a couple empty shelves. I cannot tell you what joy filled my heart.

A couple month later, the shelves are nearly full. I got books for my birthday: Sherman Alexie, Patty Smith, The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, a great book about Pluto and two about witchcraft. I special ordered The New Jim Crow from Book Passages. I was sent review copies of several new feminist books.

The other night I went to visit a friend who just returned from China and Africa. She has a new roommate moving in so she needs to clear out bookshelves. She had put aside about ten mysteries she thought I would like. Then she started throwing other books at me: do you want this? How about this? She handed me Joel Beinin’s Was The Red Flag Flying There? a history of Marxism in Palestine. I tried to resist. It’s the kind of book I would look at and think I should read, not really the kind I will read. But if I didn’t take it, she was going to give it away. Couldn’t let that happen. I might want it sometime. She tried to give me The Tragedy of Zionism by Bernard Avishai but fortunately, I remembered I already have it. As I heaved the overflowing bag of books into my car, I said, “I will not buy another book until I have read all these.”

That was five days ago and I haven’t bought a book. So maybe I’m kicking the habit?

On his way to lunch, my coworker said he had just heard on the radio that the U.S. Census Bureau is reporting what he has known for years: that this is the first generation of kids who will not outlive their parents. He implied that this finding was based on the increase in environmental toxins, nuclear accidents, oil spills and depleted uranium. I was surprised and a little skeptical, because that sounded awfully political for the Census Bureau. I also wondered which generation they were actually talking about – mine (I think we’re officially the Me Generation)? Gen X? Gen Y? The kids being born now, whose gen doesn’t have a name yet? While he was at lunch, I went looking for it on the net. Didn’t find it. What I did find were about a thousand articles projecting that today’s children will not outlive their parents because of – you guessed it, childhood obesity. And among the many prognostications of gloom and fat – none of which, as far as I could tell, contained any actual statistical evidence that kids are going to die sooner than their parents - was a diamond in the rough called “What Michelle Obama's childhood obesity project gets wrong,” by Kate Harding. I clicked on the link taking me to Harding’s blog, and there I found out that she is a coeditor of a book called Feed Me!: Writers Dish about Food, Eating, Weight, and Body Image. I really think I might have to have that book. I didn’t buy it, but I recalled that I actually have some money on a Powell’s gift card yet to be spent.

My coworker came back from lunch and I asked him if he remembered where he heard about that census data. He said it was on Randi Rhoads’ show and allowed as how it might not have actually been from the Census Bureau. He said Randi usually has her sources on her website, so I went to it. Didn’t find anything about that segment, but I did find an op-ed about the social base of Tea Party, authored by two professors named David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam who, I learned, are the authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. Oh no. That sounds so interesting.

The op-ed was in the New York Times, and while I was there, my eye fell on another opinion piece, this one about the educational value of various types of homework. Some of you know that this is an obsession of mine. Don’t ask me why, either bad memories of time spent making castles out of sugar cubes as a kid or maybe it’s that several nights a week when I get home from work and a meeting or social gathering, I have to spend a few hours working on a blog or a radio show. Anyway, this article, which I found fascinating, cited various studies on how people learn, including “spaced repetition” (you retain material better if you see it a number of different times for shorter periods, rather than for a longer period all at once) and “retrieval practice” (drills and tests) was written by Annie Murphy Paul, and of course she has a book too, called Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Really exciting to me, especially since I just read something else that seemed to dispute the premise that prenatal experience is crucial in our development. And hey, this book is about pregnancy so that would be a natural for Women’s Magazine, which means … I might have to get it.

Now you might ask, why don’t I get these books at the library? I’ll tell you: because I don’t read fast. Plus with all this blogging and keeping a weekly radio show on the air, I don’t have as much time for reading as I wish I did. So when I go to the library, I see four things I want and get them all, but then I don’t always get through them in three weeks, and I end up owing fines. I know you can renew stuff online nowadays, but the fact is, I’m just not that organized. I like having a choice of what to read, being able to start something, put it down, start something else, come back to the first one, have several half-read choices on my nightstand. Call me old-fashioned.

Okay, so I’m obviously a bookaholic. But my question is, is that a problem? I mean, it’s a harmless addiction, right? It might even be called healthy – after all, reading is better for me than watching TV, isn’t it? Less likely to make me obese, anyway, from what I’ve read on the net. In fact, book-buying might be called paying it forward, since I am hoping people are some day going to buy my book(s). (Okay, for those of you who have been bugging me about when Murder Under the Bridge is going to be available to buy - don’t start. Soon, I promise.) But consider this: what if, some day, the weight of all my books causes my apartment to slide into the mud? And since I’m on the first floor, the apartment upstairs from me could collapse.

Maybe I’d better check out Books Anonymous. No doubt some of the other people there will be trying to cleanse by giving away their books.

First They Came for the Jewish Film Festival …

2011-09-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

I am so upset that I am nearly incoherent. Once again, the bullies who pose as protectors of Jews have bullied an institution into canceling a cultural event – in this case, an art exhibit by children from Gaza. The exhibit, initiated by Middle East Children’s Alliance, has been planned for months and was scheduled to open in just two weeks. The cancellation not only robs the Gazan kids of the opportunity to share their work with international kids; it also deprives Bay Area kids of the chance to participate in a number of events and workshops that were planned to accompany the exhibit.

The people who pressured the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland to cancel the show have not made any statement explaining what’s so threatening about children’s art. It’s hard to imagine what they could say. But the question is not why they wanted to shut it down – that’s obvious. They feel that kids’ drawings of soldiers pouring into houses, people running from helicopters raining ammunition, demolished homes, kids in prison, will make people sympathetic to the kids and hostile to the people – the Israeli government – who sent the soldiers and the helicopters. People are likely to believe that if kids are drawing such things, it’s because they have seen them. So the victims of the attacks must be forbidden to speak about it. It is not very different from our culture’s use of shame to prevent women from speaking out against rape. It is an extension of Israel’s new “Nakba Law,” which prohibits schools and other public institutions from talking about the war crimes committed against Palestinians in Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence.”

The question is why a public museum here in the United States, in the supposedly progressive Bay Area, could be persuaded to participate in this act of censorship. This is only the latest in a long list of such successful campaigns – from the one that got the Toronto LGBT Pride Parade to ban the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from marching to the one that got the LGBT Center in New York to cancel an Israeli Apartheid Week party, to the one that got DePaul University to deny tenure to Professor Norman Finkelstein, to the one that got City University of New York to rescind an honorary degree offered to playwright Tony Kushner (an action which was ultimately reversed). It’s a continuation of the mobilization that brought new restrictions in the activities of Bay Area Jewish organizations after the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival had the temerity to show the film, ‘Rachel,” an Israeli film investigating the death of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza.

Usually the rallying cry of the organizations that demand these events be cancelled is “Why are you singling out Israel?” although in fact, the institutions targeted rarely are doing that. But in this case, it is the Palestinian children who are singled out. They alone, among all the children in the world, are not entitled to a voice, because allowing their voices to be heard might bring criticism to Israel.

Imagine for a moment that MOCHA were presenting an exhibition of Tibetan children’s art, and supporters of the Chinese government protested that allowing people to see drawings by children who lived under Chinese occupation was anti-Chinese. Not only can I not conceive that MOCHA would cave in to the pressure and cancel the show, but if they did, every human rights and civil liberties organization in town, or in the country, would be screaming foul. In fact, I would bet that the same Jewish organizations who act so decisively and aggressively to shut down anything that might generate sympathy for Palestinians would be among those decrying censorship by pro-Chinese forces.

While we don’t know exactly which organizations brought what pressure to bear on the museum and its donors, we do know that Palestinian cultural events are among the targets of a six million dollar campaign launched last year by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. I happened to run across a blog urging people to protest the exhibit. Under this photo of a piece allegedly part of the planned show,

the author(s) of the blog write(s):

“Notice the use of Jewish stars in the "art" turning this from simply a chronicle of childrens experiences during war, into a demonization of Jewish state. The anti-American imagery provides a nice touch, too.”

Now I would point out that every one of the “Jewish stars” in the drawing is in fact an Israeli flag. The American flag is a representation of the well-known fact that much of the ammunition Israel uses in Gaza is supplied by the U.S. Are Gazan kids taught that in school? Yes. Why shouldn’t they be? If our country believes in arming Israel to the tune of $4 billion a year, including supplying illegal white phosphorous bombs used in populated areas during Operation Cast Lead, we should not mind that being depicted in a child’s drawing.

The blog then goes on to make this claim:

“The Children of Sderot, just a mile from the Gaza border are truly living under siege, suffering from daily missile attacks. Indeed, there are common threads in the drawings, yet the Israeli children manage to convey the horrors of war without the use of anti-Islamic imagery.”

This is one of the photos they used to illustrate their point:

In fact, the Israeli child's picture is remarkably similar to the Gazan child's. The rockets are painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag. But by conflating “Jewish” with “Israeli”, and contrasting it with “Islamic,” the Zionists hope to convince the uninformed that this is a religious battle between Islam and Judaism, and also to wish the Palestinian nation out of existence. This builds on Golda Meir’s assertion that “There are no Palestinians.”

And therein lies the basis for their objection to the exhibit. If people are allowed to see art by children in Gaza, they might get the idea that Palestinians actually do exist.

The good news is that the censoring of the exhibit has drawn much more attention, both in the mainstream press and the blogosphere, than the exhibit ever would have. We need to use that attention to turn the focus on the real issues: bullying and censorship.

We learned that Niemüller poem, “First they came for the unionists…” in Hebrew school. It’s time to make a new version: “First they came for Norman Finkelstein …”

Don’t wait til they come for you. Speak out now: call/write/email MOCHA. Be polite and respectful, tell them how much you were looking forward to the exhibit, tell them you believe all children have the right to be heard and ask them to change their decision.

Writing Is Theft: "The Help," Kathryn Stockett and Me

2011-09-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

The other day, I went to see “The Help” with some other white feminists. On my own, I probably would have skipped it, because one, nothing I had heard made me think I would enjoy it much, and two, I might have felt it was politically incorrect to contribute even a teensy amount to the success of a film so many African American feminists find racist. But my friend wanted to see it so we could discuss it, I’ve already participated in some debates around it, and as another friend said, “It’s not like you’re breaking a cultural boycott.”

I decided if I was going to criticize something, it could be considered good intellectual practice to see it first.

Some of my white friends have been confused by the anger of African American feminists over the film and book. They point out that the white characters are unsympathetic, even the heroine, Skeeter, isn’t that heroic. The movie does make the point that Black children were left alone or with other relatives while their mothers cared for white kids who grew up to become racists. One friend said she felt the book did portray some of the complexities and missteps of white women doing antiracist work.

Now that I’ve seen the film, I have nothing much to say that hasn’t already been said very well. The best thing we as white women can do is listen to what our African American sisters are saying, and try to understand it. It's time to put into practice all those years of Unlearning Racism workshops – read the myriad commentaries and discuss them among ourselves. The blog that resonated the most for me is by Nicole Sconiers, who writes, “None of the black women seemed to have any agency, seemed to have a life outside of a white woman’s kitchen. Did Aibileen like to sing or dance? Did she like to pick flowers or make lemonade? If she or any of her fellow maids had an interior life, it was drowned out by the incessant drumbeat of despair.”

Kelly Sims says "Good inspiration here, whether you're in 2nd grade or well past grade school."

One thing I have been looking for and haven't found, except in a couple comments on blogs, was the reaction of African American who worked in white people’s homes, especially in the South. It’s not terribly surprising, perhaps, that working class women of my mom’s generation are not big in the blogosphere (my mom steadfastly refuses to allow a computer in her house), but I figure there must be some out there, and I’d really like to see what they have to say, so if anyone has seen something, please send it my way.

What I do have something to say about is writing and the question of fiction versus appropriation.

I obviously have no idea if Kathryn Stockett intentionally stole Ablene Cooper’s name and personal details for her book. The only thing I can say is that if she did, it’s hard to believe such an idiot could write a book. The theft – if there was one – is kind of like the theft that occurs in the movie: destined to be discovered. Ablene Cooper isn’t someone Stockett could imagine would forget they ever met. She’s Stockett’s brother’s long-time employee. If Stockett wanted to get away with using Cooper’s details, changing the character’s name and making the gold tooth a gap or mole would have been the ultimate in good sense.

But this I do know: Writers write. We also steal.

Occasionally someone says to me, “I wish I could write novels like you, but I don’t have enough imagination.” I used to say exactly that. I would read my favorite writers like Marge Piercy and think, “How did she get that idea?” And then I noticed those pages that I usually skip at the back of books, where the author thanks all the people who helped her. Piercy often gives pages and pages of books she read in the course of her research. Elizabeth George will thank dozens of experts in whatever arcane fields are involved in her intricately plotted mysteries. That’s when I realized that fiction writing is about two-fifths inspiration and three-fifths stealing from other people’s lives.

Be careful what you tell a writer. She will write it in her notebook and you never know when it might surface as the backstory or frontstory of some character of questionable virtue. If she doesn’t thank you in the acknowledgements, don’t feel too bad. There’s a fifty-fifty chance she doesn’t even remember who told it to her.

I write mysteries about Palestine. I’m not Palestinian. My series has two protagonists, a Jewish American lesbian peace activist (not like anyone I know) and a Palestinian policewoman. I don’t know any Palestinian policewomen, at least not well enough to milk them for their stories. If any actual Palestinian policewomen, or men, ever read my novels, they’ll probably find the description of their work life unrecognizable.

I started writing my first book in late 2004. I named my Palestinian protagonist Rania. I picked that name because I liked it, and because I thought – incorrectly, as it turns out – that it would be easy for non-Arabic speakers to pronounce. More than a year after I finished my first draft, my friend Marilyn sent me an article from the New York Times about a new women’s police force being formed in Gaza. The head of the squad was a young woman named Rania.

I know a number of women named Rania. I did not name Rania after any of them, and I don’t believe she bears any similarity to any of them except that she’s brave and so are many of them. But of course I don’t really know. She had a brother who was killed in the First Intifada, but who didn’t? I did not consciously model her after any specific person, but I based parts of her character and her history on a number of women I know and admire. She became an activist in her teens, like Intisar and Hanan and Amal; she went to college in Jerusalem like Fatima; she lives in Mas’ha like Munira; she grew up in Aida Camp where I have a number of friends.

I try to make my Palestinian characters authentic flesh and blood people, and in the service of that end, I steal biographical details, physical and psychological traits from Palestinians I know. I hope this is okay because my intentions are good; I am trying to further the Palestinian struggle for justice as I understand it. But I’m also writing fiction. Not all of my Palestinian characters are admirable. Some of the situations I have imagined have never, as far as I know, happened, though most of them have. I put words in my characters' mouths and I'm sure some of them are words no Palestinian would ever think. How could they, when they think in Arabic and I think mostly in English? My readers see Rania as a nonstereotypical Palestinian woman, but in fact, I think she is a stereotype - the brave, smart, feisty, idealistic Palestinian woman. That just happens to be a stereotype we don’t see much.

I hope if any Palestinian women read my books, they’ll like them and think they accurately depict the situation and the people, or at least some of the people. But I think it’s very likely that some of them won’t feel that way at all. They might be very angry and feel like I appropriated their stories and did something with them they find frivolous or even offensive. (After all, my books also contain lesbian sex.) If people criticize me, I hope I can listen and hear what they’re saying and learn from it, which doesn't mean I'll agree or decide to change my writing. If I ever make any money off them, I believe I would share it with Palestinians or use it to support Palestinian nonviolent resistance, but that’s easy to say when the money’s all theoretical.

If my goal were only to do something good for Palestine, it would obviously be better to put my energy into helping Palestinian women writers get published in the U.S. But ultimately, that’s not why I’m writing these books. I’m writing them for fun, and to express myself as an artist. I write about Palestine because I spent time a year and a half there, and those were by far the most exciting eighteen months of my life, and I came home with 1,000 pages of journals I wanted to do something with. I am an activist for boycott of Israel because I care about Palestinian liberation, but I’m writing about Palestine because I’m a writer.

Kathryn Stockett did not, I imagine, set out to tell the stories of Ablene Cooper or the family maid, Demetrie, she says she wanted to honor. She set out to tell the part of her own story that involves Demetrie. That in itself is not the problem. The problem is really that Demetrie and Ablene and the many other women who shared their experiences do not have the opportunity to tell their own stories to a wide audience (well, Demetrie obviously doesn't, because she's dead, but you know what I mean). If a woman who worked for decades as a maid and nanny decided, like Aibileen in “The Help,” to start writing late in life, it’s highly unlikely she would get a contract or end up with a best seller and a major motion picture.

That is also not Stockett’s fault. But this is the thing that white people who want to “do good” have so much trouble with. Understanding privilege isn’t about finding fault. It’s about recognizing that we didn’t create inequality, but we do benefit from it. Therefore, we can’t just say, “It’s not my fault.” We have a responsibility to try to change it. Stockett told NPR that the criticism of her book “makes her cringe.” I would suggest she stop cringing and start listening.

Venus Williams: Bringing Up Designer Baby

2011-09-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Venus Williams had to withdraw from the U.S. Open due to recently-diagnosed Sjogren’s Syndrome. Big deal, if you’re not a tennis fan, and not earth-shattering even if you are. At 31, Venus’s glory days have been behind her for a while. She has played very little over the last few years, battling one injury after another and, some say, flagging interest in the game.

We feel bad for Venus, but she isn’t the Williams everyone’s interested in anyway. That’s Serena, fifteen months younger, seven major titles more decorated, and everyone’s pick to win a fourth Open this year.

Thanks to by Jayegirl99 for the photo.

Serena herself is just back from a series of debilitating injuries and illnesses, some life-threatening. In May, she was rushed to the hospital with a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot in her lung) and a related hematoma in her stomach. Both of those were likely complications from a freak injury – she cut her foot at a bar, requiring two surgeries, which kept her out of last year’s U.S. Open.

Okay, so again, what’s the beef? Lots of people get blood clots, especially after surgery. “Prior surgery, air travel, prolonged sitting, birth control pills, obesity and pregnancy can predispose a patient to a blood clot in the leg that can travel to the lung,” a cardiovascular surgeon told People magazine in relation to Serena’s hospitalization.

It got me thinking, though. Two young women in the same family, legendary for their fitness, with a highly paid entourage helping them tweak their diets and exercise regimens, battling conditions that are fairly rare for people of their ages. Sjogren’s is an autoimmune disorder that, as sports viewers have heard numerous times over the last couple days, “strikes 4 million Americans annually, 90% of them women.” What the commentators haven’t mentioned is that the condition – a disorder in which “a person’s white blood cells attack their moisture-producing glands” – normally appears in women in their late 40s.

Bad luck? Maybe, but I also found this suggestion: “Elite athletes -- often perceived as the epitome of health and fitness -- may be more susceptible to common illness and are therefore proving useful in helping scientists understand more about the immune system…”

What the study tentatively suggests is that “[S]alivary proteins [proteins in saliva] such as lactoferrin and lysozyme act to prevent microbes from infecting the body and typically increase as the body fights off infection … An initial observational study comparing elite rowers with sedentary individuals over five months clearly showed that exercise was associated with a significant reduction in the concentration of lactoferrin. Theoretically, exercise is a stress on the body and leads to a greater susceptibility to illness. The decrease in salivary proteins, one of the body's first lines of defence against infection, may help explain this.’”

So basically, if I understand this correctly, the moistures that our glands secrete are filled with proteins that help us fight infection, but in athletes, some of these fighter instincts are suppressed. Now here’s what I could find about the causes of Sjogren’s Syndrome.

“Researchers think Sjogren's syndrome is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. … Scientists think that the trigger may be a viral or bacterial infection. It might work like this: A person who has a Sjogren's syndrome associated gene gets a viral infection.

The virus stimulates the immune system to act, but the gene alters the attack, sending fighter cells (lymphocytes) to the eye and mouth glands.

Once there, the lymphocytes attack healthy cells, causing the inflammation that damages the glands and keeps them from working properly.”

Once again, it seems to me, we are talking about secretions that are supposed to protect the body being altered in some way that prevents them from doing their jobs.

The health risks of girly sports like figure skating and gymnastics, where prepubescent girl athletes are encouraged if not forced to starve themselves in order to appear delicate and cute and then put enormous stress on their brittle bones, have been well documented – not that anything has been done to stop it. (Though young girls are most susceptible to that type of abuse, notably because the biological changes of a normal puberty can completely change their balance and center of gravity and destroy their promising careers, it’s plenty damaging to males too. Two time Olympic pairs skating champion Sergei Grinkov died of a heart attack at 28, while Christopher Bowman, whose career was hindered in part by his resistance to “discipline”, died of an overdose at 40.) We all know that repeated concussions leave football players with a huge risk of dementia, sleep disorders and depression, and that boxing causes severe brain injuries, leading the British Medical Association to push for it to be banned.

But tennis? What can be more wholesome? It’s outdoors, it’s not one set of repetitive motions; it takes eye-hand coordination and speed and endurance and anticipation. You can be a “thinking” player like Martina Hingis or an ultraphysical one like Rafael Nadal, or a combination, which is what the Williams sisters have always been considered. Though there’s a lot of sexist looksism aimed at the women, and comments about how “fit” someone is and who should lose a few pounds, most of the players don’t appear anorexic or emaciated.

It could be that it’s not what the sport is that causes the most severe injury to a young person pushed into focusing on one thing before they are old enough to choose.

It’s hard to write something that might sound like an indictment of Richard Williams and Oracene Price. They’ve been dragged through the wringer by the tennis establishment and media, who’ve criticized everything from their coaching methods to the way they congratulated opponents’ parents to the way their daughters dressed. African Americans from Compton, with no formal tennis education, were not going to be welcomed into a bastion of white upper-class etiquette if they didn’t bow down to its received wisdom, and the Williams – parents and kids – did not. They weren’t Arthur Ashe or Althea Gibson. They weren’t grateful, they weren’t humble and they weren’t always gracious. They were just good. The girls had to prove over and over that they were smart and polite, while their every expression and utterance was scrutinized for evidence of race.

The story itself is oft-told. Richard Williams was watching television and saw Virginia Ruzici, a Romanian tennis star of the 70s, win a tournament and get a check for $40,000. He decided to have two more daughters and make them into tennis players. He taught himself and his wife to play, sought advice from videotapes, coaches and sports psychologists, and started his new daughters playing when they were three and four-and-a-half. The rest, as they say, is history.

I saw Venus in her first pro competition, which was here in Oakland. She won a round, maybe two, before losing to one of the best players of that period. She was a gangly, happy fifteen-year-old who jumped up and down when she won her first match, but when she lost she was disconsolate. It had, apparently, never occurred to her that she couldn’t be the best the minute she stepped on the court. A year and a half later, she made the finals of the U.S. Open, losing to Hingis. The next day, I happened to see her and her father on a talk show from New York. Her father said something like, “I would rather Venus run track, because she’s never lost a track meet.” He also at that time made a statement which would be quoted widely for years: “Venus is going to be great, but Serena will be better.”

I figured he was just trying to motivate his daughter, but I found his comments abusive. He needed to be building Venus up, not subtly putting her down. I’ve never completely trusted the rivalry between the sisters. I don’t doubt for a second that they’re as loving and close as they appear and claim to be. They’ve had ample time, by now, to go their own ways if they wanted and they haven’t. They continue to live together, play doubles together, root for one another, talk each other up. Serena said today when asked about her sister’s illness, “I can’t put into words how much I care about Venus.”

Venus and Serena seem to have good lives. They’re fabulously wealthy, wildly famous, beautiful, educated. But they are also designer babies. We question the morality of having kids to create a genetic match for a family member who needs a transplant, but what about the morality of having kids to raise their families out of poverty? The Williamses are far from the only ones. Martina Hingis’s mother named her for Martina Navratilova because she was going to be a tennis champion. Tiger Woods’ father put a golf club in his hand before his first birthday. In the book Bounce, Matthew Syed tells the story of Laszlo Polgar, who in the late sixties and early seventies had three daughters to test a theory about chess. Olympic gymnast Dominique Moceanu sued her parents for emancipation when she was 17, after her father squandered $2 million she had earned from competition and endorsements. Danica Patrick’s father has managed her career since she started racing go-karts at ten years old.

In her autobiography, Serena insists no one ever made her play tennis. She wanted to do it, she says, because that’s what you did in her family. I’m sure that’s true. When you’re a little kid, you want nothing more than to do what your older siblings do. Despite all the hype these days about ADD and ADHD, it’s not hard to get kids to practice something over and over and over. In my experience, kids will gladly spend three hours pumping coins into broken video games, sliding down a slide or running back and forth between two trees.

But there’s a difference between the kid who decides to run back and forth for an hour, and a kid who does it because her parents set up starting blocks and a finish line. Even more difference if the parent or an older sibling times the child with a stopwatch.

In my family, it was religious education that was important, so I wanted to be a star in that arena. My sister learned to read Torah – that is, learned to read the notations for chanting the weekly portions, and to read the archaic Hebrew without vowels – at age 10, so I learned at 9. When my oldest sister decided she wasn’t going to ride in cars on the Sabbath – a custom my family, which was Conservative, did not practice – I did too. No one forced me. At the time, I thought religion was important to me. As an adult, I somewhat reluctantly concluded that it isn’t.

I wasn’t hurt by my religious education, and I don’t regret it. But I also wasn’t supporting my family with it.

Ordinary kids in this country aren’t allowed to work until they’re 16, and then their hours are sharply regulated. The days when tweeners went out to pick strawberries or work in textile factories because their little fingers were more nimble than the grownups’ are supposed to be over – though Michelle Bachman and others want to bring them back (and plenty of immigrant kids work in hidden sweatshops). Yet child athletes can get commercial endorsements and financial backing, even in highly dangerous sports like motocross and snowboarding. On a plane a few years ago, I sat next to a 12-year-old kid who was returning from a motocross competition. He showed me a picture of himself in a sports magazine. He couldn’t even get a driver’s license, but he was being sponsored to jump motorcycles over concrete walls. He’d already had two surgeries.

Richard Williams, along with Earl Woods and Laszlo Polgar and the rest, prove that it’s possible to create a champion. What none of them have proven is that that creates a happy, healthy human being. What Venus seems passionate about is clothing design. It’s the career she chose for herself; tennis was chosen for her before she was born. Maybe it’s time for the designer baby to just be a designer.

Bradley Manning and the G Word

2011-08-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

I first heard about military whistleblower Bradley Manning on Democracy Now! – where else? shortly after his arrest. Since then, DN! has done at least ten segments on Manning, including an hour-long interview with his friend and prison visitor, David House. As far as I know and can tell (by searching the transcripts, though I heard most of the interviews as well), no one – including the gay legal writer Glenn Greenwald, who has been interviewed about Manning a few times - ever mentioned that Manning considers himself gay and may also be transgendered.*

Whenever they had a music break during one of their segments, however, the accompanying video would always be the same two pictures. One of them shows Bradley, a small, delicate blond youth, holding a sign calling for EQUALITY: @ The House @ The Classroom, @ the Battlefield, Everywhere, decorated with rainbow flags. I knew what that meant, even if Democracy Now! didn’t. The other picture shows Brad – as his friends call him – arm-in-arm and cheek-to-cheek with another guy. This guy, I now know, is Tyler Watkins, Manning’s boyfriend, who identifies as a drag queen.

A few months ago, I asked a friend who works with Courage to Resist, the organization formed to support GI Resisters, which since his arrest has been focusing mainly on Manning, whether Bradley was gay. He said he didn’t know. He looked a little surprised that I was asking, and I explained that I had seen the pictures on Democracy Now! and that if he is gay and out, we might be able to mobilize support for him – and by extension do anti-war organizing – in the queer community. He nodded and said it seemed like a good idea, but he didn’t have any idea how to get more info.

Not long after that encounter, I heard an announcement for a Free Bradley Manning contingent in the SF LGBT Freedom Day Parade. I joined it, and it was pretty good – most of the marchers seemed quite straight, but there were a few other queer leftists and a sign that said something about Bradley being a “gay hero.” The response from the crowd was excellent. We happened – or maybe it was less coincidental than that – to be lined up on the block with the ACLU, Amnesty International and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and nearly everyone in those contingents wore a Free Bradley Manning sticker too, so along with the huge banners courtesy of Courage to Resist and World Can’t Wait, we looked much bigger than we were. There were also contingents in a number of other cities, including New York, London, and Chicago.

I asked another friend who has been involved with the case if she knew why this apparently well-known information was only being spoken now, a year after Manning’s highly publicized arrest. She didn’t, but speculated that his supporters hadn’t wanted to “distract” from the whistleblowing. She mentioned that the right-wing had recently been using Manning’s sexuality to discredit him, and guessed that that was why the left had decided it was no longer unspeakable.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me to Google “Bradley Manning gay” before that. If I had I would have learned that the hacktivist blog Gawker had published an article on June 23, 2010, less than a month after Manning’s arrest, stating that, “It's been speculated that alleged Army leaker, PFC Bradley Manning, is transgendered. We've found evidence that strongly suggests Manning has some sort of LGBT identity, and that the man who snitched on him exploited this to win his trust.”

Two months after that, the New York Times published a piece that began: “He spent part of his childhood with his father in the arid plains of central Oklahoma, where classmates made fun of him for being a geek. He spent another part with his mother in a small, remote corner of southwest Wales, where classmates made fun of him for being gay.

In an article published on August 1, 2010, Manning’s mother told the UK Guardian, “‘He was different from other kids. He was interested in girls but he could never really get them to be interested in him. When he was 13, he told me he was gay.’

Around the same time, the British Daily Telegraph on July 30, 2010 ran a story containing the line, “Mr Manning, who is openly homosexual, …”

These stories revealed that Manning was active in trying to overturn Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – a very popular activity among straight servicepeople, I’m sure. The Facebook pages he linked on his profile were “LGBT America, Gay Marriage, Equality Maryland, Dan Savage, Human Rights Campaign.” The photo Democracy Now! keeps using, from the anti-DADT rally, came from his Facebook too.

Turns out the only people who DIDN’T know Bradley identified as gay were those of us who were getting our news from supposedly progressive media and the antiwar movement.

The question of Manning’s gender identity is more ambiguous. From the logs that have been published of his fateful chat with Adrian Lamo, the bisexual agent who turned him in to the government and then handed over the record of their chats to Wired magazine, it sounds like he was still figuring some of that out. According to the Gawker piece, “Lamo—who was once appointed to San Francisco's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender, Queer and Questioning Youth Task Force … told the Times that ‘“It's [his queer identity] a personal matter for him, and I do not think it was one his family would want aired in the national media.”’

Did it occur to Lamo that Bradley’s family might not want their son held incommunicado at Quantico or Ft. Leavenworth?

Was shame over Lamo’s betrayal the reason queer organizations didn’t quickly rally behind Bradley, or was it, as LGBT historian Larry Goldsmith recently argued, because “Bradley Manning is not that butch patriotic homosexual, so central to the gays-in-the-military campaign, who Defends Democracy and Fights Terrorism with a virility indistinguishable from that of his straight buddies. He is not that pillar of social and economic stability, only incidentally homosexual, who returns home from the front to a respectable profession and a faithful spouse and children.”?

Or could it be that no one has asked them to get involved, because his sexuality and gender identity is a “distraction” that “shouldn’t be an issue”? I am not asserting that – I don’t know, but if my experience is at all typical, explicitly queer activism on Bradley’s behalf has not, until recently at least, been encouraged by the people mobilizing support for him.

So why should it be an issue? Should Ehren Watada’s Japanese ancestry have been an issue? Should Camilo Mejia’s Latino heritage, or the fact that Stephen Funk is a gay Filipino have been issues? No, except insofar as they helped to rally support for resisters, and to connect GI resistance to other liberation struggles. In our society, identity matters. And it’s clear that being gay and/or transgender is at least as important to Bradley Manning’s identity as the fact that his mother is Welsh.

Find out how you can Support Bradley Manning.

* Greenwald did finally mention Manning's "issues of sexual orientation and gender identity" in an article for Salon.com on July 4 of this year.

Violence Up, Violence Down - Can Americans Really Be Getting Less Violent?

2011-08-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

“Do you think there’s a lot more violence in this country than there used to be, or are we just hearing about more of it?” my coworker asked last week.

It’s a good question. The established answer – established by people I like to listen to, like the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, is that violent crime rates have been plunging for years, and continue to do so.

I have to say that I find that hard to believe. Poverty rates are higher than ever and climbing steeply, and inequality is growing exponentially. One in seven people is on some form of food assistance, and that doesn’t include the people who need it but can’t get it. Jobs are scarcer, more and more people are long-term unemployed, more and more have lost their homes – all of which adds up to a lot more desperation, and I assume that in this country as in nearly every other, desperation yields violence.

Moreover, our nation’s conduct in the world has grown ever more violent. In the last ten years, we’ve gone from no official wars to three. We’ve come to accept indefinite detention and torture as normal, and given up dozens of rights we thought were sacrosanct throughout the last century. We have more veterans coming home with PTSD, and added to that things like climate insecurity and fear of nuclear disaster. And we have, as we have for the last thirty years, an ever escalating prison population, which means an ever escalating population of damaged and traumatized people in our communities. We have unprecedented expenditures for “Homeland Security” and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) running checkpoints in front of elementary schools.

Yet, according to a New York Times article in May, “The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years.” The article goes on to give details: “Nationally, murder fell 4.4 percent last year. Forcible rape — which excludes statutory rape and other sex offenses — fell 4.2 percent. Aggravated assault fell 3.6 percent. Property crimes — including burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson — fell 2.8 percent, after a 4.6 percent drop the year before.”
So if they are not lying to us, what could possibly account for this stunningly counterintuitive reality?

The law & order people would certainly argue that our increasingly repressive criminal justice policies are bearing fruit. But that would run counter to the received wisdom of organizations like the ACLU which have demonstrated that increasing penalties does not lead to less crime. In fact, says Cal law professor Frank Zimring in the Times article, “As the percentage of people behind bars has decreased in the past few years, violent crime rates have fallen as well.”

People like Jeffrey Canada (Harlem Children’s Zone founder) would argue that it’s programs like his, Head Start and charter schools inculcating groovy values in kids at younger and younger ages which is starting to pay off.

Or is it possible that things like Alternatives to Violence Projects, Community Dispute Resolution Centers and Men Against Violence have begun to have an impact?

I’d certainly like to believe these last two possibilities, and no doubt, there is some incremental shifts that have occurred. Physical violence, known as “corporal punishment” was a staple of most households and many schools when I was growing up. Now hitting as official policy is pretty rare among parents and school districts, though there’s certainly plenty of child abuse going on. Probably fewer kids are learning at very young ages that hitting is a legitimate way to get what you want, and that probably has some little ripple effect on the society.

But what I really believe is that it’s a question of finding what you look for. My light summer reading for this week is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It’s an extraordinary book, and one of the things it does masterfully is explain why the vast majority of law enforcement resources in this country are devoted to arresting nonviolent drug offenders, who account for over 60% of the prison population. While the rhetoric of the War on Drugs says that they are going after “kingpins” and “violent narcotraffickers,” the fact is that 83% of drug arrests are for simple possession, not distribution or sale. Since 1980, the number of people in prison for a drug offense has increased from 41,000 to 500,000; nearly half of drug arrests are for marijuana.

The War on Drugs has brought billions of federal dollars to state and local police forces, explains author Michelle Alexander: “Each arrest, in theory, would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding. Non-drug-related policing brought no federal dollars, even for violent crime.” Not sure what that “in theory” is doing there, but we can see that “violence” may only seem to be decreasing because police departments aren’t investigating it and disillusioned and terrified community members are not reporting it. In other words, violence might be “down” because there’s no money in it.

The flip side of that interpretation of finding what you look for is that popular media increasingly looks for sensationalized violence to entertain us with. “If it bleeds, it leads,” and with people having so many more news sources available, all-gore channels have become more and more common (with, of course, the obligatory final moment of faux-lightness as the perky blonde anchorwoman tells us some heartwarming story about a cat).

A BBC News report on the falling violent crime phenomenon (which, note, does not actually say falling “violence”) poses nine possible explanations, ranging from Obama to the availability of abortion (obviously, the author of that study is not clued into realities, which are that abortions are getting less and less available) to this gem:

“A study released last month suggested video games were keeping young people off the streets and therefore away from crime. Researchers in Texas working with the Centre for European Economic Research said this "incapacitation effect" more than offset any direct impact the content of the games may have had in encouraging violent behaviour.”

Blockades Are Better in the Morning

2011-08-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

Monday afternoon, I came out of work and saw a couple hundred people standing outside of BART. I knew they weren’t a demonstration. Must have been the fact that they were all on cellphones and had briefcases that clued me in.

“BART’s closed?” I asked someone. He looked up from his iPhone.

“Yeah, those stupid protesters shut it down,” he said. Up above, helicopters whirred. It sounded like a war zone.

“Do you know where they are?” I asked someone. From the number of helicopters circling over our heads, they couldn’t be far. I figured if I couldn’t get home anyway, I might as well join them.

“They went that way about ten minutes ago,” a woman said. I walked a block in the direction she pointed but didn’t see or hear anyone except one lone guy in a Guy Fawkes mask with a megaphone. I couldn’t make out anything he was saying.

I texted a friend I thought might be on the demo, but she wasn’t. She didn’t know where they were. I figured it was probably near over anyway – it was called for 5:00 and it was now past 6:30. I walked four blocks to the temporary Transbay Terminal, where the NL bus, which goes near my house, was just pulling up. I climbed on and got a seat, one of those four-tops with two rows facing each other. There was a guy next to me and two women across from us. They were all African American. Two of them were trying to go to West Oakland Station, and someone apparently recommended that bus, which doesn’t go that close. I’d like to believe there is one that actually goes to West Oakland, which is probably the most popular station in the East Bay, but I can’t be sure there is. West Oakland, after all, is a poor, mostly African American part of town, and there have been big cuts in bus service in Oakland and Berkeley, another casualty of Proposition 13 and Schwarzenegger.

The guy next to me was in a big hurry and fuming about how long it was taking for the long line of passengers unfamiliar with the routine to pay their fares and get on the bus. The two women were talking about how the protesters were.

“I hope they’re not doing this just because BART shut down cell phone service,” one said. “I mean, how dumb can you get?”

“Well,” I said, “they did kill that guy for no reason.” Two months ago, BART police killed Charles Hill, a drunk, homeless man who had been reported as acting unruly on the platform. The cops said Hill threatened them with a broken bottle. Witnesses said the bottle he was carrying didn’t break until he fell after being shot. They also said he was moving slowly, and the cops shouldn’t have had any trouble subduing him without using their guns.

Every article in the mainstream press refers to Hill as “knife-wielding” but my understanding is that they found the knife in his pocket after he was dead; it wasn’t in his hand.

And of course, this is the third passenger killed by BART police in two and a half years. 21-year-old Oscar Grant was killed on the platform at Fruitvale Station on New Year’s Eve, 2009, and in a much-less publicized incident, Fred Collins was shot in the back at Fruitvale Station in July 2010.

BART’s reaction, rather than any expression of contrition or maybe a reorganization of their obviously troubled police force, has been to take drastic actions to quell protests of these killings. The first protest at Fruitvale Station, where Oscar Grant was killed, was noisy but peaceful until the police shut down the station, not allowing passengers to exit there. That prompted the march which turned into a mini-riot and ended in hundreds of arrests.

The occasion for Monday’s action was that the week before BART shut down cell phone service in four stations to foil “flash mob” organizing. They claimed they did it because the protest threatened to become “chaotic,” a nebulous code word suggesting violence and disruption, where in fact the protesters were, from what eyewitnesses told me, only holding banners and leafleting.

The cell phone shutdown caught national attention in a way that neither the killing of Hill nor the light sentence given to the officer who executed Oscar Grant in cold blood did. (Johannes Mehserle, the white cop who shot the African American Grant, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years. He actually spent 12 months in jail.)

The ACLU was on every national talk show last week, proclaiming this the first time that the “U.S. government” has interfered with cellphone service in order to prevent protest. They compared it to thegovernments of China and Syria shutting down internet access to quell dissent. The hacktivist group Anonymous chose to punish BART by, along with taking down the website for several hours last Sunday, publishing names and phone numbers of people who did nothing more than buy a parking permit from BART. BART responded to the hack by calling in the FBI, and Anonymous upped the ante by publishing the personal information of BART cops.

Meanwhile, the passengers on my bus could not be convinced that any of it was worth the disruption to their lives.

“There are other ways to do it,” said the guy who was so late. “Call your congressman.”

“That never works,” I argued. “Nothing has ever been won without protest. Think of the civil rights movement, the labor movement, Social Security, all of it.”

One of the women across from me looked semi-impressed. Her friend shook her head. “It’s not worth it,” she said.

I mollified them by saying, “Well, back when I was organizing this kind of thing” (not that I’m done with my activist career, but they didn’t need to know that) “we always had a rule that we didn’t disrupt the evening commute. Blockades and traffic disruptions should always be first thing in the morning. Most people won’t mind if you make them late to work.”

Five good things to read on Israel’s July 14 movement

2011-08-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

People keep asking me when I’m going to write about the Israeli Tent Protests, which have been dubbed the July 14 Movement. I always shamefacedly explain that I haven’t said anything because I don’t know anything. So finally the other day I spent some time seeing what people I respect over there are saying.

Much of the U.S. and Israeli left have been quick to dismiss the protests as reformist and bourgeois, pointing out that they have deliberately avoided the issues of occupation and apartheid. One thing I do want to point out is that I did not hear those same critiques leveled at the mass mobilizations in Wisconsin and Ohio last spring. Those movements were also not left-wing. They did not have an anti-war, anti-occupation, anti-capitalist agenda. They did not call for funding education by eliminating prisons and the police occupations of Black communities – if they had, the police and prison guards would not have been participating in the demonstrations. They did not have a broad critique of institutionalized racism. That’s not to say there were not leftists, anti-capitalists and anti-racists involved, but they chose to be involved for the same reason that many Israeli leftists are choosing to be involved in a big-tent movement.

In fact, the July 14 Movement seems to me not very different from the Wisconsin revolt, except that 1) it has mobilized a much larger proportion of the country’s population (up to 10%), and 2) it is, at least, taking on core policies of neoliberalism. It is demanding a welfare state and includes demands for the unemployed, as well as for those workers lucky enough to have union jobs.

The other thing that struck me is that there's a peculiar symmetry between this protest - tents springing up all over the country, some huge, some tiny, and the tents that sprang up in every Palestinian village and town in 2004 to support the prisoners' hunger strike. That makes it doubly ironic that the Israeli protesters are not engaging the issue of Palestinian self-determination. But of course, appropriating Palestinian cultural memes is as Israeli as ... falafel.

I won’t bore you with any more of my unfounded opinions. Here are five pieces I found very enlightening, and each of them is on a different site which will provide you with more links to various perspectives.

Israel’s protests Part 1: a tragic wasted chance (Part I) and The revolution inside the Revolution (Part II): “While it’s easy to decry the insistent shunning of “politics” that leads this movement, there’s plenty to find and celebrate if you rummage around. … As and when the central events dwindle, the committed, political and mixed-race protests will become more vulnerable, but those remaining around them will be more politicised and committed. …There is already an anticipation of a crackdown. The politicians who have spent the past few years lovingly crafting increasingly racist laws to silence and intimidate the Palestinian minority must be itching to stop this blatant demand for their rights.… Many people are on edge, expecting trouble. Police and prison pay has been quickly hiked up by 40%.”

Tent 1948, by Abir Kopty, “If you are Palestinian, it will be difficult to find anything to identify with in Tel Aviv's tents’ city on Rothschild Boulevard, until you reach Tent 1948. My first tour there was a few days ago, when I decided to join Tent 1948. Tent 1948's main message is that social justice should be for all. It brings together Jewish and Palestinian citizens who believe in shared sovereignty in the state of all its citizens….”

The Tent Protests in Israel: Can They Break Out of the (Zionist) Box? by Jeff Halper “…This is an uprising worth following. Not an Arab Spring perhaps but a promising Israeli Summer. A process of consciousness-raising has certainly begun amongst mainstream Jewish Israelis who for generations have been locked in "The Box" of conformist thinking.”

The people want a reset. by Amira Hass “As the movement grows, some will continue to think and demand "justice" within the borders of one nation, at the expense of the other nation that lives in this land. Others will understand that this will never be a country of justice and welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens.”

Arab-Israelis should find an ally in the Israeli tent protests, by Asma Agbariyeh-Zahalka “…I think the time for complaints has passed, and there is no point in boasting about our victimhood, about the fact that we are the more oppressed, as if our identity is bound up with our misery. It’s time to come out of the Arab closet. The Israeli protest movement has initiated and represents social and economic change. Arab society must ask, Are we in favor of such change or not? Can this movement which demands social change also open itself up to the Arab population? Does the movement have a rightwing, fascist aura, or is it left-leaning and democratic, able to include social justice for Arabs too?”

Throwing Down at 52

2011-08-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Friday was my birthday (I'm two years older than President Obama) and I decided I wanted to mix activism with celebrating. Friday evening we had our monthly Women In Black vigil against war and occupation, so I saw a bunch of friends there and a few of us went to dinner after. Saturday morning some other friends and I joined “Throw Down for the Town,” a community service festival in Oakland. Throw Down is organized by Soul of the City, an initiative of the human rights nonprofit Ella Baker Center (started by Van Jones, the first casualty of Obama’s ability to be bullied by Fox News). Soul of the City’s mission statement says, “Soul of the City places the well-being of Oakland directly in the hands of the community. We honor the important role that each person plays in creating a vibrant and thriving city.” There were more than 15 service projects to choose from. We chose to help clean up part of Laney College, the community college just on the other side of Lake Merritt from where I live. We worked hard for about two hours, and then went for a lovely lunch.

The cleanup itself was kind of intense, because part of the area where we were working is a little woodsy, on the banks of a pond, and it’s obviously a place where homeless people go to relieve themselves, eat, sleep, and avoid police harassment. I found muddy, waterlogged clothes and backpack straps, along with the usual petrified Wendy’s cups, bottles, cans, condom wrappers and toilet paper. Fortunately, the organizers had borrowed those grabber things from the City, and they also had plenty of latex gloves. Nonetheless, when I suggested we head to an Ethiopian restaurant, one of my friends said, “I don’t feel like eating with my hands right now.” So we opted for Mexican instead.

Used under Creative Commons License from website
of Chris Jordan

As I picked up all that detritus, I thought, “Maybe I really should work on banning plastic food containers in Oakland.” Plastic recycling is one of the big boondoggles of the last couple decades, because the more people feel like they can recycle it, the more of it socially conscious people feel like we can use. And in reality, very little plastic is actually recycled. “Recycling” sounds like it’s melted down and reshaped into more plastic food containers, but in reality, the 6-8% of the plastic we use that can be recycled at all gets converted into indoor-outdoor carpeting and polyester car seats through an extremely toxic process mainly carried out inChina. The Berkeley Ecology Center has a greatwebsite on myths about and alternatives to plastic recycling. A woman who was at Hedgebrook with me, Victoria Sloan Jordan, is working on a project with her husband, Chris Jordan, who is a photographer, documenting the destruction of the albatross population from eating the plastic we discard. The photos, which you can see online, are incredible because in some of them, you can’t tell what they’re of and it looks quite beautiful, and then you realize it’s this awful devastation.

Banning plastic would not only be good for the environment and for the health of the people who live near the plants where it’s processed. I just finished reading a book called Girls on the Edge, by Leonard Sax, who is both a pediatrician and a psychologist. He talks about four factors “driving the crisis of today’s girls” and one of them is “environmental toxins.” He presented extensive evidence that plastic food, beverage and lotion containers are a major cause of early puberty in girls (a 2010 study reported in the journal Pediatrics that almost 25% of African American girls have reached a stage of breast development marking the onset of puberty by age 7, as had almost 15% of Latina girls and more than 10% of white girls.).

At the same time, campaigns such as plastic bans need to be done in a way that is sensitive to all of the other social issues accompanying our purchasing choices. If we force McDonald’s to sell coffee in paper cups, we need to first research where those will come from and how they are produced. A few years ago, Berkeley banned plastic shopping bags from supermarkets. Certainly, a lot more people are using nondisposable bags, but probably a majority of people are getting groceries in paper bags. I can’t say how many times I have walked out without putting bags in my car, or gone into a store thinking I’m only going to buy a few things, and ended up needing a paper bag. I’m not sure how much better that is than the plastic ones. They biodegrade, yes, but we can’t pretend that forests are not being sacrificed for our paper bags. Ideally, we would take our groceries in baskets or carts, and if you dropped in without your cart, you would be able to borrow one, maybe for a buck deposit or something. Or even more ideally, we would all be shopping in small stores close to home, and the shopkeepers would know us and be glad to lend us a basket or cart, confident that we’d bring it back.

We would need to ensure that McDonald’s would not raise their prices to make up for the fact that we’re “making them” switch to more environmentally friendly materials. It shouldn’t, of course, be more expensive to use compostable paper, because it’s incredibly expensive to produce plastic, but with subsidies and corporate economies of scale, those costs are skewed.

Ultimately, all of this still relies on the premise that capitalism can be made environmentally friendly and humane, and in fact, that’s probably not the case. I heard a radio show the other day about a project that’s promoting sustainable seafood. One of the participants in the MarineStewardship Council’s eco-labeling program is WalMart, and with the world’s largest retail store signed on, the Marine Stewardship Council has the leverage to convince their suppliers to adopt line-only fishing and other sustainable fishing practices. It’s great, on one hand, that WalMart has become so convinced that their customers want sustainable food that they were willing to join this effort. On the other, I thought, well while you’re getting WalMart to sign onto the line-only fish pledge, couldn’t you get them to sign a union contract with their workers?

Neither picking up trash nor banning plastic wrapping and containers will result in a livable community. Seeing the evidence that people are using that fairly inhospitable area (I ended up with brambles in my butt) for a bedroom and lavatory reminds me how many people very nearby are without the basics of comfort and dignity. I started thinking, well maybe we should build some composting toilets here so people don’t have to leave used toilet paper in the grass. On the way to lunch, we passed a long line of elderly people waiting for food from the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church food pantry. As we were parking, a guy who asks me for fifty cents every day when I’m going to line up for the carpool to the city yelled “Got fifty cents?” at our car as we sped around the corner. “That’s not very effective panhandling technique,” I said to my friends.

What I did like about Throw Down was that it was real. It wasn’t giving money to some nonprofit to hire people to do something about our social problems – which is also important, don’t get me wrong. Abel Guillen, a young man who is currently on the Community College Board and now running for State Assembly () came by to campaign. I asked him what his top issues were, and he said, “Creating jobs.”

“That’s right,” I said, “People could be doing this for money.” He agreed. I asked how he proposed to fund it and his answer made my little heart go pitter-patter:

“Oil severance tax. Single-payer health care.”

“You’re obviously my guy,” I said.

It brought us into contact with young people from our own neighborhood that I rarely interact with, and gave us ideas about how to create more community. My neighbor, Simin, had the idea that we should get some of those garbage grabbers at the hardware store and go out on our own street once a month. It’s not really about the garbage, she said, but that if people see you doing something, they will come and talk to you. I was reminded of a story I was told a few years ago by a friend of a friend. She lives on a cul-de-sac in San Francisco, where there’s no street cleaning, so she started going out with a broom and sweeping the street. At first, her neighbors thought she was crazy. But after a while, a couple other women came to help. Eventually they ended up starting a community garden, even getting a small grant to reclaim a park for their kids.

I hate getting notices from Facebook that I should pick a Cause and get my “friends” to donate to it for my birthday. No offense to any of my Facebook friends who have done that. The idea of making our special days not just about us is great. I just hate the mechanization of it, the notion that we can build communities of people who never set eyes on each other. Don’t get me wrong. Obviously, this is a blog. In the blogging class I took recently, I stated that “finding a community of like-minded people” was my top reason for blogging. But today’s activity made me think about the limits of virtual community, and the value of getting our hands dirty.

Six Ways to Avoid News Fatigue

2011-08-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

People who have known me for a long time will attest to the fact that before I had a car, I never listened to the radio. In fact, I hated radios; I don’t know why, but there was something about the disembodied voice that really annoyed me. But once I started driving, I started occasionally listening to KPFA, because it was easier than fidgeting with tapes with one hand on the steering wheel. Then came 9-11, and in my hunger for news and analysis of the changing political world in this country, I got hooked on Democracy Now! That first foray into public radio led me to This American Life, Against the Grain, As It Happens, and the occasional dip into Fresh Air. Somewhere along the line, I discovered the Sunday folk music shows on KPFA (Across the Great Divide is the best), followed by the Saturday afternoon lineup on KALW (Folk Music and Beyond, Thistle and Shamrock, A Patchwork Quilt, Bluegrass Signal), Michael Feldman’s What Do You Know and KPFA’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa. Suffice it to say, I’m now a dedicated, if not consistent, radio listener.

A few years ago I started doing radio as well. So now when I listen it’s not only for the information they’re giving; it’s also to get ideas for stories (usually by noticing what gender angles or women’s voices are left out of the other shows), and to learn to do it better from people who have more experience and professional training.

But somewhere along the line, I stopped enjoying it so much. Of course, I still sometimes hear things that inspire, enliven, uplift or enlighten me, but more often, I turn it off feeling more despondent than I did when I turned it on.

What changed, the radio or me?

photo by 4rilla

Probably some of both. When something is new, it’s exciting. I hadn’t known you could get all this information just by plugging in a little radio! How cool is that? It made me part of a community with my friends, who had been dedicated KPFA and KALW listeners for years. Learning to do radio has been one of the great privileges of my last few years, and since people kept criticizing my shows without giving any helpful advice, it was liberating to realize I had a classroom right on my desk at work. Now that I’ve been listening for a number of years, I realize I’m hearing the same people a lot, and I usually know what they are going to say.

But I also think that progressive community radio has been influenced by changes in the mainstream media more than we realize. Five or ten years ago, shows like Against the Grain, Democracy Now! and the KPFA Sunday Show used to interview a lot more activists than they do now. They’ve become more expert dependent, and the way you become an expert is generally by publishing a book or a New York Times op-ed or getting a Ph.D., and while you are doing those things, you’re probably not out organizing a social movement. As someone who’s trying to do both, I can tell you it’s nearly impossible.

In the first three days of last week, I probably heard or saw twelve hours of coverage of the debt ceiling deal, if you count Comedy Central. I heard eight economists, five reporters, three Congresspeople, the former Labor Secretary and the current press secretary (no partridges). I heard Dean Baker twice and Rick Wolff three times on two different shows. Not surprisingly, they said the same thing each time. Ultimately, none of them had anything to say I didn’t already know. It’s not that they don’t know things I don’t – they know a lot. But they all said the same things they’ve been saying for months because they’re being asked the same questions: why does Obama always give in to the Tea Party? (he doesn’t have enough experience standing up to bullies). What’s this going to mean for us? (bad bad bad). What would he have done if he were FDR or LBJ? (Tax the rich, create jobs, lay down the law to Congress.) Meanwhile the mainstream pundits kept repeating the mantra “You have to cut Social Security and Medicare,” without a peep from the likes of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

No one said anything about what those of us who want to see a different strategy can or should do to bring it about. Democracy Now! interviewed Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women, who spearheaded a campaign to get Congress to protect the needs of women, but they didn’t interview her until after the deal had been approved in Congress. I interviewed her the week before, when at least people could sign the online petition, but I don’t have the listenership that DN! has. I don’t say that it would have made a difference if another few thousand people had signed a petition, but at least it would have given people some way to participate.

Along about Thursday, a phrase flashed into my mind. News Fatigue. I’m not sure where I first heard of it, but I sure know I’ve got it. At a party the other night, I mentioned this to a number of friends and acquaintances, and nearly everyone said, “Oh, yes, I don’t listen to any of those shows any more.” A couple people mentioned things they’re listening to instead. Then Sunday evening, I happened to catch part of New America Now: Voices from the New Majority (Fridays at noon and Sundays at 3 pm on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco). They were talking about redistricting, and the part that I heard went into depth about how prisons are used to give disproportionate influence to some very small districts. It was fascinating. I’d never heard that, it made total sense and it explained some things I had never understood. I was so interested, I sat in my car for fifteen minutes after I got where I was going.

So here are six shows I’m going to listen to instead of the daily news-oriented shows, and if you have News Fatigue, you might want to try them too:

1. Fresh Air (KALW 9-10 am, repeated 6-7 pm; KQED 1-2 pm or 7-8 pm; podcast available): Terry Gross asks great questions and has interesting people on. It’s usually upbeat without being fluffy. Her guest on Monday was Charles C. Mann, author of 1493, which documents how Columbus changed the world by introducing Europe and the Americas to each other’s crops, animals and diseases. She's more progressive on most issues than you might think.

2. Your Call (KALW 10-11 am, repeated at 8-9 pm; available for download): Maybe it’s because it’s a call-in show, but they almost always have a more grassroots angle on whatever issues they’re covering. They bring in a lot of local folks you hardly ever hear elsewhere. (One week, their Friday media roundtable even included a guy from Socialist Worker!) A recent show I heard was “How Are Magazines Surviving” with editors and publishers of Bitch, Utne Reader and The Sun.

3. Are We Alone? Really cool science show on KALW (Tuesdays at 1:00 pm), also available for podcast or download. The last show, “Written in Code” explores “ENCORE Genes – what are they good for? Absolutely… something. But not everything. Your “genius” genes need to be turned on – and your environment determines that. Find out how to unleash your inner-Einstein, and what scientists learned from studying the famous physicist’s brain.”

4. This American Life (KALW Sundays 1:00 pm, KQED Saturday noon and 10:00 pm or by podcast): With rare exceptions, it’s interesting, funny and unexpected. The last one I heard (I podcast it, but I often forget to download the podcasts and they’re only available for two weeks) was called “When Patents Attack!” and was about patent trolls. Don’t know what that is? You want to find out!

5. Making Contact (Friday 1:30 pm on KPFA, or on the website): Unfortunately it’s only half an hour a week but they sometimes have extras on their website (they even put a piece of mine up once, though I can’t find it now). Last week’s show was called “Remixing Revolution: Art, Music and Politics”, excerpting a panel discussion called “The God’s Must Be Crazy: Reviving the Black Supernatural Experience.” Before that they had a two-parter on the Wisconsin workers’ revolt. Irresistible.

6. Rock en Rebeliòn (Sundays 5:00 pm on KPFA; check website for archives): I love this show ’cause I get to practice my Spanish by listening to people who often are not native speakers so they speak slowly. Plus it’s bilingue, so if I get lost, I can generally catch up when they drift into English, and the beats are great.

What are your suggestions to break out of news fatigue? What shows or other experiences do you love? (If you’re getting this by email, don’t email me your ideas! but go to the blog and post them as comments so other people can see them too.)

Slut Walk and Porn Wars: What's Choice Got to Do With It?

2011-08-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Report from SlutWalk San Diego, posted on IndyBay by Zenger's Newsmagazine

Slut Walk has sparked some of the most vibrant political debates among feminists since Monica Lewinsky. For those who don’t know about it, Slut Walk is an international response to an incident in which young women at York University in Toronto were told by police that if they don’t want to be raped, they should not dress like sluts. Women have organized marches from Sydney to New York to London. San Francisco’s is tonight (August 6). The organizers urge women to come wearing whatever they want, to make the age-old point that no woman asks or deserves to be raped, regardless of what she wears. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has proclaimed this movement “the new feminism.”

Rebecca Traister wrote in the New York Times Magazine that she is ambivalent about the message of the walks, an ambivalence I think a lot of feminists share. Jessica Grose, writing on Slate.com, offered “kudos” for the piece, saying, “The tone of disagreements in the feminist blogosphere can be truly vicious—there can be a real tendency for other writers and commentators to pile on when you veer from the party line. … The push-back to Traister's piece has already begun…” Feministing.com hosted a thoughtful and spirited discussion among its bloggers, with Rebecca Traister joining.

Muslim women criticized the march for being uninclusive, and African American women pointed out that for years, they have been fighting for the right not to be called slut and ho.

This is familiar territory. How many rooms did I sit in through the eighties and nineties listening to feminists passionately arguing about whether sex work is liberatory or exploitative or whether it can possibly be both, whether we should embrace or deface pornography, or whether we could do both?

The transgressive nature of reclaiming pejorative identities is also something that resonates for me. In the early 1980s, groups I was part of were among the first to openly embrace the word “queer.” At antiwar demonstration, I was soberly lectured by any number of straight activists who didn’t understand why would want to be called by a word that was most often heard in the mouths of bashers. When our award-winning chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping,” was expropriated and changed to “We’re here, it’s clear, we’re not going shopping,” we almost came to blows with some of our favorite heterocommunists.
So my first reaction to Slut Walk was great, you go, girls. I looked at some of the pictures and video and they are moving.

Young women want to be attractive, and in our culture, attractive means sexy, and sexy generally means showing a lot of skin. That’s cool. They should do what makes them comfortable. The problem with that, just like the problem with trying to differentiate “sex work” from “exploitation” or “trafficking” is that we live in a misogynist culture, and in a misogynist culture, a cigar is never just a cigar.

Our culture is both hypersexualized and anti-sex. Even little girls are expected, almost required, to show that they’re sexually available and interested. Victoria’s Secret has a line called “Pink” which markets frilly halter tops and short shorts to nine-year-olds.

A friend of mine recently figured out that his 16-year-old daughter didn’t want to go to a party because she was being set up to have oral sex with some guy she didn’t even know.

I said, “Did you tell her she’d have plenty of opportunities for coercive sex soon enough?”

He said, “Actually, that’s exactly what I told her.”

At the same time, our social policy is more and more based on punishing women, especially young women and women of color, for having sex. Whether you’re talking about abstinence-only education, welfare cuts, restrictions on abortion and birth control, refusing to fund HPV vaccines or criminalization of addicted women who become pregnant, the message is clear: women who have sex for any reason other than reproduction in the context of white, heterosexual marriage are bad and should suffer.

In this environment, it’s very hard to be sex-positive. When t-shirts bearing slogans like “Yes but not w u” are aggressively marketed to 13-year-old girls, can anyone say that they are really choosing to be “sluts”? Of course, they should be free to walk around wearing anything they want and not be harassed or attacked.

The question some of us older feminists are asking though, is, are they really wearing what they want to wear, or what patriarchal society wants them to wear? Do they want to be sluts, or is that another box that they’re being shoved into and then condemned for occupying, like whore, femme fatale, bitch and superwoman?
How did we get from burning bras and corsets (which I’m told never actually happened) to marching for the right to spend lots of money on clothes that are for the most part highly uncomfortable?

Rebecca Traister asks why this is the issue that has galvanized the most feminist activism in recent years. I would add to that, why is it the issue which has galvanized the most interest in the feminist blogosphere?
It doesn’t surprise me that the mainstream media fixates on a movement of young, mostly white women dressed in not much. But does the feminist movement have to help them? On one hand, a lot of good pieces have been written, a lot of good interviews given that would never have seen the light of day if they hadn’t been on a “sexy” issue. I just wish feminist Twitter and YouTube could have helped the demand of over 250 women’s organizations not to balance the budget on the backs of women go viral, maybe the New York Times would have written one word about it. (Didn’t hear about that? Check it out.) Maybe next time, some young college women can paint their bare midriffs with the names of immigrant women being deported away from their U.S.-born children.

To Preserve the Welfare State, Fighting Racism Is Key

2011-08-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about changes in Western Europe relating to the mass immigration of darker skinned and Muslim people. Steve Hill, author of Europe’s Promise, called my analysis shallow and “glass half empty.” I’m sure it is shallow – I’m a blogger, with a degree in political theory, not comparative European politics, while Steve has spent years researching European political systems. Since getting that feedback, though, I have sought out the opinions of a lot of European experts, and I haven’t really heard anything that contradicts the thesis I put forth in “Song of Norway” – that immigration and global economic conditions are pushing even the most progressive countries of Europe to the right (which doesn’t mean they are going to get there or stay there).

But I was not trying to paint a gloomy prognosis for Europe’s decline into nativism and fascism. Rather, I meant to point out that over the last half century, the most egalitarian countries in Western Europe have also been the most monocultural. As they become more heterogeneous, they might want to take heed of the experience of this country, where fear (or maybe just hatred) of the Other has been used quite disastrously to wage war on programs that promote equality.

One of the things we need to remember, when mourning the slow death of the U.S. welfare state, is that it was never motivated by compassion for people of color. Noam Chomsky points out that even in these anti-tax-and-spend days, a majority of white U.S.Americans actually favor giving more government money to poor people – unless those people are Black. They make a distinction between “supporting the (deserving) poor,” and “welfare”, which we have been trained to see as synonymous with “giving money to (undeserving) Black people or immigrants.” Not coincidentally, the attack on the welfare state grows in ferocity as the political power of African Americans is increasingly curtailed, by a combination of voter suppression, redistricting and gentrification of urban population centers.

In the mid-1930s, when the New Deal was enacted, the population of the U.S. was 88.7% white, 9.7% African American and 1.2% Mexican (in the 1940 census, Mexicans were recategorized as white). The only other groups counted were Native Americans, Chinese, and Japanese, who together made up 0.5% of the population. The electorate was well over 95% white, since 77% of African Americans lived in the South, where they could not vote.

White unemployment in 1933 was about 25%. In 1930, African American unemployment was slightly lower than that of whites (because their wages were much lower) but by 1935, it was nearly twice as high. Many African Americans were thrown out of work so that whites could take their jobs. At least half a million Mexicans were deported (“repatriated”) in the thirties, 60% of them U.S. citizens. Many of the New Deal programs, including Social Security, either expressly or de facto excluded African Americans. Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force (as well as over half of women workers) were not covered by Social Security. Waiters, butlers, domestic and agricultural workers were all excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the minimum wage.

The New Deal was possible because so many white people were homeless and out of work that nearly everyone, with the exception of the wealthiest white Americans, had close friends or family members who needed the help. Today that’s not the case. We say that unemployment is 9.3%, and many commentators point out that it’s really more like 16%, but even those numbers obfuscate the reality, that certain communities are affected much more heavily and others scarcely at all. Even to say that white unemployment is at 8%, African American 16.5% and Latino 12% is misleading, because those rates are not constant across racial groups. For whites rural unemployment and poverty are much higher than urban, while 40-50% of young African American men in some cities are unemployed or marginally employed.

For whites with college degrees, the unemployment rate is 2.9% while for those who haven’t finished high school it’s 12%. Since in the 2010 midterm elections, the turnout was 78% white and college educated and only 13% of voters had family incomes under $30,000 a year, we can kind of see why we’re in danger of losing our Social Security.

By far the best news I’ve read in ages is in an article called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy, Be More Equal.” Three psychologists have recently found that Americans are happier “when national wealth is distributed more evenly than when it is distributed unevenly.”

The bad news? The wealthiest 20% don’t follow the trend.

Neither the U.S. nor Europe has a long tradition of tolerance. Contemporary Europe was built by exporting people it saw as undesirable, while the U.S. was built by exterminating them. But let’s not forget that Europe has done its share of exterminating, both on its shores and abroad. If we don’t want to see those bloody histories repeated, we must – all of us – work on creating true multiculturalism, something none of our societies have ever had.

(Jesus Christ) Tim DeChristopher, Who Are You, What Have You Sacrificed?

2011-07-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

Supporters at Tim DeChristopher's sentencing
from www.peacefuluprising.org

Tim DeChristopher seems to have grown up a lot in the last two years. That’s what you would expect, from a 29-year-old who spent his last years since college facing the possibility of a long prison term.

Days after foiling a government auction of oil and gas drilling rights in the closing days of the Bush administration, DeChristopher told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman:

“I’ve seen the need for more serious action by the environmental movement and to protect a livable future for all of us. And frankly, I’ve been hoping that someone would step up and someone would come out and be the leader and someone would put themselves on the line and make the sacrifices necessary to get us on a path to a more livable future. And I guess I just couldn’t wait any longer for that someone to come out there and had to accept the fact that that someone might be me.”

At that time, I thought, Hey, hold on a minute. A lot of people have been doing a lot of environmental activism for a long time. You might not know about them, and obviously they weren’t there in the auction hall that day, but one bold action doesn’t make you the leader of the movement. I thought he was being awfully dismissive of people with good reasons not to risk spending years in prison, and was also ignoring the importance of collective action.

In his sentencing speech, he spoke more carefully, saying he was willing to go to prison if it inspires others to act. In a video made shortly before his last court date, he said others who have gone to prison for acts of conscience have told him that knowing you are there for what you believe in makes it easier to do the time. In that he is certainly right. During the month I spent in jail in Israel, I felt what a privilege it was to be in jail for doing something I wanted to do, that I was proud of doing.

DeChristopher has a lot to be proud of. He made a concrete difference, protecting at least 22,000 acres of land from drilling, much of it permanently. He has certainly motivated others to take actions they would not have taken otherwise – like the 26 people arrested outside the courthouse on Tuesday.

He also has a lot to think about. There is almost never a direct correlation between one person’s major sacrifice and the growth of a larger movement. I talked about that a few weeks ago, in my rundown of hunger strikes, some successful and others spectacularly not. Tim DeChristopher is going to jail for an impulsive act of courage. He did not plan it ahead of time; it’s not even clear he knew how big a risk he was taking.

For me there’s a deep irony in the timing of DeChristopher’s two-year sentence. Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer have been in prison in Iran for exactly two years this week. Josh and Shane too, are imprisoned for an impulsive act – the decision to go hiking on a certain trail in Iraqi Kurdistan, on a certain day, when they happened to be spotted by Iranian border guards who decided to make them political pawns. But unlike DeChristopher, they did not get to choose their battle. They are imprisoned for the crimes of the U.S. government, crimes they have spent their adult lives opposing.

Sarah Shourd, who was arrested with Shane and Josh, was released last September. I worked with Sarah on an action protesting five years of the Iraq War in 2008. Because I knew her slightly, I have been haunted by the plight of the hikers for two years. As I did when Lori Berenson was arrested in Peru, I constantly reflect that their fate could have been mine, if I’d been less lucky in a few situations. And I often think about how sad it is that three young lives have been interrupted for no good reason, that they do not have the comfort of knowing they are standing up for what’s right. They, like so many others in prisons all over the world, were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I hope DeChristopher will be able to use his time in prison well and will come out convinced that what he did was right for him. To a great extent, whether he accomplishes what he wanted to – to spark a more militant movement, is now very much out of his hands. That’s one of the problems of acting on your own; you might find out that you were too far ahead of the people you wanted to lead. Certainly the prosecutors and the judge in his case intended, by imposing such a harsh sentence, to make sure that others don’t follow his example. The Daily Utah Chronicle reported,

“Inside the courtroom, prosecutors said DeChristopher’s sentence would act as a deterrence to others from conducting similar acts of civil disobedience.

‘Significant acts lead to significant consequences,’ prosecutors said.”

A spokeswoman for Peaceful Uprising, a group that DeChristopher helped to found, made this “official statement” as she left the courthouse:

“Consider this your call to action. Consider this the spark that will ignite this movement. Our hearts are broken today, because we see a charismatic, bright, concerned man who cares for the future of the next generation, be incarcerated in federal prison and treated like a criminal. If there was ever a day, if there was ever a moment in history for us to stand for climate justice, this is that moment. And we will not stop, we will not be intimidated…”

A thoughtful writer on the blog planetsave.com wonders whether people are really ready to take up the challenge DeChristopher threw down .

“Activists around the world, and DeChristopher especially, are saying that won’t silence us and will only trigger more and stronger action. The overall message and hope is that his 2-year sacrifice (which you really have to honor him for being willing to take) is going to stimulate more change and more success than would have occurred otherwise. My question is: will it, really?

“It’s easy for people to get up in arms at the news and say it will, but it’s going to be pretty darn hard to get people off their asses and doing anything comparable to what DeChristopher was willing to do.”

But one thing people should realize, and which hopefully DeChristopher now realizes, is that successful movements are composed of people willing and able to take different levels of risk. Not everyone who was inspired by the Freedom Riders became one. Some did, but others gave their Saturdays to picket at Woolworths, or traveled South for Wednesdays in Mississippi.

The other day, I heard Bay Area activist Brian Willson talking about his book, Blood on the Tracks. The title refers to an action he took in 1987, when he sat in front of a train carrying weapons from the Concord Naval Weapons Station to be shipped to Central America and elsewhere. The religious witness known as the Nuremberg Action Group had been blocking weapons trains for weeks, and every time, the train would stop and police would come and drag the people off the tracks. But this time the Naval Command decided to teach the protesters a lesson. They ordered the train crew not to stop. The other blockaders scrambled away, but Brian could not. He lost both legs.

I knew the story well – I was out of town when it happened but I had been very involved in organizing the campaign to stop weapons shipments from CNWS. I well remembered the action the next day, when thousands dismantled a section of the tracks, an action for which only one person was prosecuted. What he said that I didn’t remember was that it was only after he was injured that activists began a 24-hour-a-day peace camp there, escalating from blocking some of the trains to blocking every single one for months.

This week, Tim DeChristopher starts his prison term knowing he inspired several hundred people to come to court to support him, and 26 of them to get arrested for blocking the entrance to the courthouse. Hopefully when he is released, whether it’s in two years or sooner (he is planning to appeal), he will feel good about what came from his sacrifice.

Hopefully Josh and Shane will be released tomorrow or very soon thereafter – they are supposed to be brought to “trial,” and their lawyer thinks that even if convicted of being spies – which they definitely are not, they might be sentenced to time served. When they get home, hopefully they will be able to turn their ordeal into something they can be proud of.

Help free Shane and Josh.

Support Tim DeChristopher.